It’s been a long week of meetings, deadlines, and a few too many emails, so I think it’s safe to say that you’ve earned some couch time this weekend. I’ve handpicked these three TV series on Apple TV+ that are short enough for you to binge over a single weekend, but are loaded with action, drama, laughs, and even some weird robot sci-fi stuff to make it feel like a real escape for a while.
So sink into your comfy place and let these quick weekend binge shows give you the work-week reward you deserve.
3
Smoke
Release Year
2025
Seasons
1
Episodes
9
Overall Running Time
7 hours 47 minutes
Status
Unconfirmed
The same pairing that delivered us the Emmy-winning Apple TV+ psychodrama Black Bird has traded the cold, sterile prison walls for the blazing flames of small-town arson investigators. Taron Egerton and Dennis Lehane team up again for Smoke, a nine-episode true-crime thriller with a hot cast and even hotter premise.
Drawing material from the popular Firebug podcast, Egerton stars as hotshot arson investigator Dave Gudsen, whose department is under pressure to find two dangerous arsonists wreaking havoc on the fictional town of Umberland. One firebug is the disturbed Freddy (Mtare Guma Mbaho Mwine in a breakout role), who likes to use milk jugs filled with fryer oil from his chicken shack job. The other is a little more complicated, and you’ll have to wait for the second episode to find out. But it sparks an intense cat-and-mouse chase with Dave’s hardened partner (Jurnee Smollett)—who has her own disturbing relationship with fire—leading the charge.
Smoke doesn’t take long to get burning, and features some sharp and deeply complex character work from Egerton and costars, which also includes Greg Kinnear as Gnudsen’s surly chief, Harvey.
2
Murderbot
Release Year
2025
Seasons
10
Episodes
4
Overall Running Time
4 hours 11 minutes
Status
Renewed
Murderbot is one of my favorite Apple TV+ series that the streaming service has delivered in a long time. It’s a weird and quirky dystopian sci-fi series with snackable episodes that each left me wanting another. Luckily, you won’t have that problem and can keep bingeing until you’ve had your fill.
In a stroke of casting genius, Alexander Skarsgård is SecUnit, a “Security Unit” cyborg who is assigned to protect the members of the naive and flaky PreservationAux research team sent to an alien planet. But this SecUnit is different—it’s managed to secretly hack the governing programming that keeps it in check (read: from killing humans). Fortunately, all that’s really done is make it sarcastic, a bit of a jerk, and obsessed with a crappy Star Trek-like soap opera it’s downloaded called The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. However, for all of its disdain for humanity (it calls itself Murderbot), SecUnit keeps the crew safe and may be the most human of them all.
Adapted from Martha Wells’ popular novellas The Murderbot Diaries, the satirical 10-episode series has been renewed for a second season on Apple TV+.
1
Lessons in Chemistry
Release Year
2023
Seasons
1
Episodes
8
Overall Running Time
6 hours 6 minutes
Status
Ended
I’ve been a Brie Larson fan since she played shallow popstar Envy Adams in Scott Pilgrim vs the World in 2010. Of course, she’s moved on since then (Room, End Game, Captain Marvel), but I’ve admired her for choosing projects on both the big and small screens, one of the latest of which is Lessons in Chemistry.
The Apple TV+ limited series just killed with 10 Emmy nominations, including a lead actress nom for Larson, who was finally given a role worthy of her talents after quite some time. That role is Elizabeth Zott, a headstrong, brilliant lab chemist in 1950s Los Angeles, whose career is derailed by the sexism of the era. Fired for stepping out of her place, and raising a daughter on her own, Zott’s talent as a cook (it’s all chemistry, after all) serendipitously lands her a job as the host of the TV cooking show Supper at Six, which becomes a huge hit. Zott’s charm and intelligence is fun to watch, as she undermines the authority of her male bosses, including the brilliantly irritated Rainn Wilson.
Lessons in Chemistry looks gorgeous, with era-accurate retro set pieces and period costumes (it’s lone Emmy win), and offers wit, real drama, and a feminist bite.
Apple TV+ may not pump out the volume of series and movies as streamers such as Netflix or Prime Video, but the quality of its award-winning programming, like Severance, The Morning Show, and live sports, cannot be denied.
