Apple TV+ makes a good drama, but don't overlook its comedies
I am an Apple TV truther, and I'd like to open the door for you beyond their prestige, cultural-phenomenon dramatic offerings which seem to be the only thing they market.
Your outtie likes the mountains and the beach. People often compliment your outtie’s smile. Your outtie has never broken a bone.
I binged Season 1 of Severance for the first time in January after trying the first episode back around the time it first premiered and failing to get into it. If I’m being honest, the FOMO was a lot of the motivation, especially after their Grand Central Station promo stunt.
I loved the show once I got into it.
But this newsletter isn’t about Severance. I’ll either write one or have some friends join for a podcast at the end of Season 2. Sorry for the bait-and-switch.
For now I’m here to preach the gospel of Apple TV+ comedies, which I think the streaming platform vastly under-markets compared to its dramas.
And hey, I get it. If Apple sees its biggest competitor as HBO Max, it’s gotta lean in to the prestige dramas. It’s narrowed the current market on sci-fi TV, too, and those tend to skew more drama than comedy, further tipping the scale that direction.
But Apple TV+ comedies — of which Wikipedia tells me there are 22 and I’ve watched six — deserve time in the spotlight, too, and are well worth your time.
The first Apple comedy I watched — outside of Ted Lasso, which I won’t be writing about because I do feel it received drama-level marketing — was Schmigadoon!, a musical comedy satirizing popular Broadway shows from the 1940s and ‘50s (Season 1) to the ‘60s and ‘70s (Season 2).
Keegan Michael-Key and Cecily Strong starred as Melissa and Josh, a couple looking to fix their struggling relationship who find the magical town of Schmidagoon while on a hike and become stuck until they find true love.
The town is based on that which would’ve been the key locale in a Golden-Age-style musical (Brigadoon being the one it steals most from), and the residents there are played mostly by real life Broadway talents: Kristin Chenoweth (Wicked), Ariana DeBose (Hamilton), Patrick Page (Hadestown) and Aaron Tveit (Moulin Rouge!) among them.
Season 2 they find themselves in “Schmicago” a reference I’m sure more of you recognize. It was unfortunately canceled, but since each season mostly stands alone — everyone besides Michael-Key and Strong play new characters — you can watch it without worrying about any real loose ends.
Watch Schmigadoon! if you liked: Wicked or basically any musical ever; the Cecily Strong era of SNL’s “Weekend Update" or Ariana DeBose’s BAFTA rap
Shrinking, if I have my timeline in order, is the next show I came to in my foray into Apple TV+ comedies.
The show stars Jason Segel, Jessica Williams and Harrison Ford as therapists at the same practice whose personal lives are also quite intertwined. The show picks up an unspecified (at least from my recollection) amount of months after Segel’s character, Jimmy Laird, loses his wife in an accident and is, at the time, unsuccessfully single-parenting his teenage daughter.
It is certainly the most well known of the streaming services comedic shows outside of Ted Lasso. Segel and Williams received Emmy nominations for Season 1 in lead actor and supporting actress, respectively.
Though there are a ton of touching, emotional moments in this show given its premise, it is still very funny in a variety of ways, as each of the main three, and even main five if you include Jimmy’s daughter, Alice, and neighbor, Liz, have different comedic stylings as actors and coping methods for the grief they’re facing in the show.
Shrinking is renewed for a third season.
Watch Shrinking if you: Have been to therapy, worry about feeling like you didn’t cherish Harrison Ford enough when he dies or vibed with Miss Fine in Booksmart
I watched almost the entirety of Platonic on plane rides during the summer of 2023, though where I was headed I cannot recall for you. Probably something work-related.
I’ll admit that because of the viewing circumstances I do not remember too, too much about the show specifically, but I do firmly remember enjoying it. It’s about Will (Seth Rogen) and Sylvia (Rose Byrne), high school(?) besties, rekindling their friendship in middle age as they both go through respective crises — Will is getting a divorce, and Sylvia is a mom returning to work as a lawyer.
There is not much in there that I can relate to on a personal level, and, if you didn’t catch from the title, there’s no romance between the two, which is what might usually draw me to a show where I don’t have much in common with the characters. Still, Rogen and Byrne’s chemistry and the antics the show gets them up to together makes for a fun watch.
The show is renewed for a second season.
Watch Platonic if you like: Smoking weed, Seth Rogen’s comedy and/or imagining you will be (or are) much cooler as a parent than you are
Loot and Mythic Quest have been my two most recent watches. I’ve finished both seasons of the former and am caught up on the latter as of writing.
Both fit what, at least in the offerings I’ve watched, are the two biggest tropes of Apple TV+’s comedic offerings: satire and work places.
Loot is maybe the most obvious example, at least to me, of the satirical strength of the streaming platform’s comedies.
It follows Molly Wells (Maya Rudolph), the divorcee of a tech mogul who gets $87 billion in the split, goes on a bender at first but then settles down and decides to immerse herself in the charity she founded years earlier and left to fend for itself.
Anyway, the show has heart, it’s laugh-out-loud funny (Joel Kim Booster as Wells’ assistant, Nicholas, plays a big hand in this) and I think it’s some of the best character work of the Apple TV+ shows I’ve watched, rivaling Ted Lasso and Shrinking.
Watch Loot because we could all use the levity of satire that is all too prescient to our current times, and I need someone to talk about the romance in it
Mythic Quest is one of OG Apple TV+ shows, and while I hadn’t really been drawn to it before, I’m glad I just decided to dive in and give it a go this month.
While not necessarily rivaling some of the top-tier shows on the streamer in my opinion, it’s a perfect example of the staying power of a workplace comedy, even when the workplace is on the more unique side.
It’s chock full of talent, at least a few of whom have roots in other ensemble comedies: Rob McElhenney as Ian Grimm, creator and creative director of the in-universe game the show is named for; Danny Pudi as the playfully manipulative head of monetization Brad Bakshi; F. Murray Abraham as eccentric, old-timer C.W. Longbottom, the game’s head writer.
Watch Mythic Quest if you watch: It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Office or Brooklyn Nine Nine
All in all, I’ve yet to encounter an Apple TV+ comedy I haven’t seen through to the end, even if it took me some time to get fully into or I felt there were episodes that dragged.
I can’t say the same for all its dramatic offerings — I started The Morning Show and didn’t make it through a full episode. The Crowded Room couldn’t keep me to its finale even starring Tom Holland.
While these might not all be the type of shows that I count down the calendar for ahead of a new season or tune in ritualistically to on a week-to-week episodic release, they are the type of comfort comedies that are easy to sink into after a long day at work, while you’re eating breakfast or just when you need a brain break.
I don’t think it’s just me who could use those types of shows right now.
Give Apple TV+’s comedy offerings a shot, and hopefully they’ll keep making them — even if they don’t market them.
What I’m Leik’ing: January
You got a lot of my TV recs for the month above, but I also kept up with the latest season of HBO Max’s The Sex Lives of College Girls. This season, the third of the Mindy Kaling comedy that follows a group of roommates at a liberal arts college in the Northeast, fell off a bit from its first two seasons with the departure of Renee Rapp. You can hear more about that on the return of the You Leik That? podcast featuring my friends Kennedi Landry and Ella Brockway.
As for what else I’m Leik’ing…
Movies:
Anora
A Real Pain
Music:
Kansas Anymore, ROLE MODEL
Chromakopia, Tyler the Creator
The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan
“DENIAL IS A RIVER”, Doechii
Podcasts:
Note: The first five in this list are just my normal rotation of podcasts. The few after that are ones I’ve rediscovered this month or listen to on occasion.
The Ringer-Verse
The Sports Gossip Show
NPR Up First
Family Trips with the Meyers Brothers
The Lonely Island and Seth Meyers Podcast
Binge Mode
House of R
The Big Picture
Books:
How to End a Love Story by Yulin Kuang