5 Underrated Apple TV Sci-Fi Shows You Have To Watch

While other streamers have packed their libraries with exploitative true crime and mediocre unscripted content, Apple+ has been quietly building a reputation for quality science fiction. With the ten-time Emmy Award-winning series "Severance," which became Apple's most-watched series with the release of its second season, the streaming network proved there's still room for prestige sci-fi in television. There's also the post-apocalyptic drama "Silo," which has garnered its own avid fandom during the show's first two seasons. 

With the recent addition of "Pluribus" from "Breaking Bad" creator Vince Gilligan, which imagines a world where all but a handful of humans have been joined together in a Borg-like hive mind, it's safe to say that Apple is quickly becoming the go-to streamer for quality genre shows. And once you've finished binging the network's glossier hits, there are plenty of hidden gems to check out on the platform — especially if you like your science fiction on the lighter side. From the whimsical "Time Bandits" to the mind-bending head trip of "Constellation," here are five underrated Apple+ sci-fi shows to add to your watch list right now. 

If you'd love a lighthearted, uplifting comedy-drama with a sci-fi twist, "The Big Door Prize" is a perfect series for your watch list. With just two seasons' worth of half-hour episodes, it can be binged in one or two sittings, making it an ideal under-the-radar watch for your next mental health day. 

The series follows the townsfolk of Deerfield, an idyllic Main Street, U.S.A. type of community where everyone knows everyone else, after the arrival of the MORPHO, an enigmatic arcade-style machine that claims to reveal its users' life potential on a small printed card. Although the machine's origin is unclear, its predictions are highly personal, often inspiring the townspeople to make dramatic life changes. Its central mysteries, which include strange blue dots appearing on townspeople and some sort of connection to a theremin, almost seem incidental to the show's primary focus on its characters' relationships and personal growth. That's fine, since the show was canceled before any of its larger questions could be resolved. 

The series revolves around a quirky and lovable cast of main characters, including Chris O'Dowd as a witty, sarcastic school teacher watching everyone around him change. An easy watch with a focus on the relationship between a person's choices and their contentment in life, "The Big Door Prize" is a feel-good charmer wrapped up in cozy vibes. 

A black comedy sci-fi series about grief and loneliness, "Sunny" is a tale of one woman's life after the apparent death of her husband and son. Rashida Jones stars as Suzie Sakamoto, an American living with her family in a near-future Kyoto when a plane carrying her robotics engineer husband Masahiko "Masa" (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and son Zen crashes. The event leaves them both missing and presumed dead. Shortly after getting hit with the tragic news, Suzie, who had always been told her husband worked in ImaTech's refrigeration division, takes delivery of a homebot named Sunny (Joanna Sotomura). Sunny is a domestic personal assistance robot manufactured by ImaTech, the company her husband worked for. 

Despite Suzie's initial efforts to abandon the homebot, she soon realizes it holds hidden secrets. Secrets that lead to the yakuza, a hidden community of hackers, and the unexpected truth about what really happened to her family. A 10-episode series with a fairly fast-moving story and a cast full of captivating characters, "Sunny" is a satisfying watch that makes a pretty decent palate cleanser for viewers still recovering from Jones' bleak "Black Mirror" episode.  

"Constellation" is a trippy psychological space thriller about an astronaut who returns to Earth to find that her world isn't quite right anymore. While it's not the most solid or earth-shattering sci-fi and certainly has its soapier moments, if you go in looking for a well-acted series with decent effects and an interesting premise, you won't come out disappointed. 

The series stars Noomi Rapace of "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" and "Prometheus" as Swedish astronaut Johanna "Jo" Ericsson. After a bizarre accident aboard the International Space Station where the body of a female astronaut collides the station, severely damaging its systems and causing one astronaut's death, Jo is left aboard alone to repair one of the Soyuz modules before returning to Earth with the remains of her colleague. In addition to the hallucinations she suffered in space, Jo arrives back home to find pieces of her life unrecognizable — from a daughter who suddenly doesn't speak Swedish to a piano she inexplicably knows how to play. 

Told through a disjointed narrative and hallucinatory visions, "Constellation" explores the terror of a world where it's hard to tell what is real from what's imagined. A solid watch for fans of mind-bending movies like "Inception," the series also stars genre TV legends Jonathan Banks ("Breaking Bad") and Barbara Sukowa ("12 Monkeys"). 

An action sci-fi comedy series from the Weitz brothers, the filmmaking duo behind "American Pie" and "About a Boy," "Murderbot" is the Alexander Skarsgård-starring adaptation of Martha Wells' book series about a far-future reality where a cyborg develops all-too-human personality traits. Skarsgård stars as the titular Murderbot, a private security cyborg (or SecUnit) made of both organic and inorganic tech who jailbreaks its own program, using its newfound autonomy to name itself "Murderbot" ... and watch countless hours of its favorite soap opera, "The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon."

After its autonomy gets accidentally revealed while it is working under a group of hippie-coded terraformers, its relationship with the humans immediately starts to get more complicated as they all find themselves facing off against hidden dangers. And futuristic corpo-capitalism.

A cute, action-packed series, "Murderbot" is a good watch for fans of TV shows like "Futurama," "Avenue 5," and "Future Man." Fans of the book series agree that Skarsgård is a perfect choice to play the adorable, TV-obsessed (and gender-neutral) cyborg who, ironically, rarely lives up to its name. Most of the time.

There could truly be no better team to remake Terry Gilliam's 1981 science fiction fantasy, "Time Bandits," than Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement. They team up with "The Inbetweeners" writer Iain Morris to recreate a whimsical adventure about a tween history geek jumping around the whole of human history with a band of time-traveling thieves. 

Like just about everything Waititi produces, the series has a lighthearted, comic strip energy wrapped around a fantastical central premise. After a band of time bandits shows up in his bedroom, the history-obsessed young Kevin (Kal-El Tuck) hitches a ride through their portal and ends up staying with them. With Kevin tagging along, and also aided by their language-translating thinking caps and a Map stolen from the Supreme Being, the sticky-fingered crew stops by historical events like the creation of Stonehenge and the Trojan War, all much to Kevin's delight. 

A fun series with a similar vibe as the lighter "Doctor Who" episodes and Waititi's "Our Flag Means Death," "Time Bandits" presents a spirited mashup of sci-fi and supernatural concepts that work best when you don't think too hard about it. Lisa Kudrow is a special highlight as the Bandits' blunt and snarky leader Penelope.