Ok, seriously — who saw that twist coming in the finale of Apple TV+’s Presumed Innocent?
No wonder Reelgood has Apple’s legal thriller pegged as the biggest of the week’s streaming TV shows. I’ll admit, I was a little hesitant to give the show a try at first, just because it so often feels like legal dramas are overly formulaic and cookie-cutter. A horrifying crime, a trial, the suspense of a verdict, rinse and repeat. I suppose I should have known from the outset that Presumed Innocent would be a different sort of animal, given not only that it was airing on Apple TV+ but that Jake Gyllenhaal also thought it was good enough to take on as his first role in a TV show.
Obviously, there’s only so much I can say here, because it would a crime to spoil the ending for anyone. But this was very much an Apple series in terms of its top-tier cast as well as the excellent production values throughout. Apple TV shows are almost always as much of a treat to simply look at as they are to follow along with.
And then there’s the fact that Apple disclosed that Presumed Innocent is the biggest of all its shows thus far, such that a Season 2 has already been green-lit. As noted above, Reelgood — which monitors 20 million viewing decisions each month across every streaming platform in the US, from Apple TV+ to Max, Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, Prime Video, Peacock, and more — has likewise found that Presumed Innocent is the biggest series this week from across all of those platforms (a distinction that’s almost certainly a consequence of the show’s shocking finale).
For the 7-day period that ended on July 31, the 10 TV shows that topped Reelgood’s latest weekly ranking are as follows:
- Presumed Innocent (Apple TV+)
- House of the Dragon (HBO/Max)
- The Decameron (Netflix)
- The Bear (FX/Hulu)
- Time Bandits (Apple TV+)
- The Boys (Prime Video)
- Those About to Die (Peacock)
- Lady in the Lake (Apple TV+)
- Evil (Paramount+)
- Snowpiercer (AMC+)
As for the rest of the biggest streaming TV shows of the week, we’ve covered most of the rest of the titles on Reelgood’s ranking — new additions to which Netflix’s The Decameron, a Bridgerton sort of raunch-fest that’s set in 1348 when the Black Plague was raging in Florence.
Long story short, the show is basically a wine-soaked sex romp among Italian nobles who’ve decamped to a lavish hideaway along with their servants. It’s a “let them eat cake” sort of move, the cake being a devastating plague that ordinary people are powerless against. Soon enough, though, this medieval black comedy offers a twist: The longer the group hides out from the plague, order and social norms start to break down. So much so that the orgy of wealth and liquor collapses into a fight for survival. Good times!