Apple TV+: The verdict on everything from The Morning Show to See

Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon in The Morning Show. Photo / Supplied

At a time when there is already so much "must-see" television available, how could you possibly want more? That is the problem facing Apple, the tech giant which is now entering the streaming game with Apple TV+.

Clearly, the company has to offer something that its competitors, primarily Netflix and Amazon Prime Video (but soon to include rival services from Disney and HBO), do not. And boy have they tried. The new content is bubbling with ideas, some of which land and some of which don't, but at the very least, Apple's programming echoes their old ad slogan: Think Different.

Dickinson, a series biopic of the great American poet Emily Dickinson, delivered in effervescent half-hour gobbets, is like something you might get if you gave an A-Level student an iPhone, an all-night coursework assignment, a copy of the poet's selected works and 10 cans of Red Bull.

Hailee Steinfeld plays Emily, whose imagination and spirit are hidebound by a stolid, 19th-century Massachusetts upbringing, and a dull mother (Jane Krakowski), who only wants her daughter to excel at housework. It's a standard emotional awakening story, but with the rapper Wiz Khalifa playing Death, a young cast of relative unknowns plainly having a ball, and a contemporary pop soundtrack, it has more new ideas in its first two episodes than most period dramas have in their entire run. It will infuriate staunch Dickinsonites, which is precisely what the poet, who often displayed a delicious sense of irony, would have wanted. What liberty a loosened spirit brings.

The Morning Show is again not the programme you thought it was going to be. It tells the story of Alex Levy, a female anchor on a US breakfast news show who is deemed "past her prime" by an all-male team of oily execs, at the precise moment her male co-host is slung out for sexual misconduct. Of course, there are elements of Network and Broadcast News here, not to mention various other failed TV shows about failing TV shows, none of which had film stars of the calibre of Jennifer Aniston, Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell in the leads, nor such a bold script.

It might have been a vanity project for Aniston, 15 years after Friends; instead she undergoes a complete career reassessment before your very eyes – her character is ageing, fading, swearing and flailing. There may be one too many iPhones on display (I counted 15 in the first two episodes) but The Morning Show charges smack bang into MeToo, as well as showing women competing with women in the workplace and even, in one succulent moment, the carnage that big tech is reaping on traditional television.

Of all the Apple launch shows, See – already branded the next Game of Thrones – looks the one most likely to collapse under the weight of its own self-importance. It has a high-concept premise – set 600 years in the future after a virus has decimated humankind and rendered the survivors blind – and cost an absolute fortune (a reported $15m an episode). Written – at times overwritten – by Peaky Blinders' Steven Knight and with Jason Momoa, of Game of Thrones, grunting gamely in the lead, there is a lot to go wrong.

Once more, however, whoever is calling the shots at Apple has let the creators take their idea and run with it. Certainly there were scenes that evoked unintentional laughter, precisely because they were supposed to be taken very seriously. Then again, the whole thing looked sensational and the idea of an entire world without sight was worked through to its every last detail. See takes itself seriously, but it takes the viewer seriously too, and that is how cult fandom begins.

Staying with what-if futures and pasts, For All Mankind is much more like the TV show you'd imagine a big tech company might make. Set in the late Sixties, it imagines what would have happened if the global space race never ended. It begins with an interstellar plot twist that you can see coming, but still knocks you flat, and though at first there's a lot of all-American whooping and machismo, it soon becomes a more thoughtful analysis of American exceptionalism. Once again, it looks superb – it's one thing to have all that money, quite another to spend it on things viewers can see. Period sci-fi turns out to be a wonderful thing.

The Elephant Queen, a documentary following a matriarch elephant called Athena and her herd, is the only show that feels a touch formulaic. Lovingly made, with Chiwetel Ejiofor on narration duty and the African landscape as screensaver backdrop, it can't really miss. But it's a one-off feature, and chocolate box TV rather than cutting-edge. A nice filler, rather than an all-new killer.

There's more to come. At the end of next month Servant will launch, following a Philadelphia couple in mourning after "an unspeakable tragedy" opens the door for a mysterious force to enter their home. From that description you won't be surprised to find it's from the mind of M Night Shyamalan, who created the sublime The Sixth Sense and the God-awful Wayward Pines.

At the very least, Servant will get a reaction, and that seems to be what Apple are after. With every streamer scrabbling for a point of difference or some word of mouth, it is better for a show to get panned than be bland. Is Apple's line-up worth $8.99 a month? That depends on whether you can fit any more television in to your life, but if you can, Apple TV+ looks like a place to find tales of the unexpected.

Apple TV+ launches in New Zealand on November 1.