What reviewers found in Small Prophets: Mackenzie Crook's comedy reaches Apple TV with near-unanimous praiseWhat reviewers found in Small Prophets: Mackenzie Crook's comedy reaches Apple TV with near-unanimous praise

Small Prophets, Mackenzie Crook's six-part comedy, is now streaming on Apple TV in every country where the service is available except the UK.

The series aired first on BBC Two and iPlayer earlier this year. Apple acquired it for international distribution in August, the first time Apple TV has bought an English-language series that had already aired elsewhere, and UK viewers get it on Apple TV in 2027. Crook created, wrote and directed it and plays the shop manager Gordon; Pearce Quigley stars as Michael Sleep, with Lauren Patel, Michael Palin, Sophie Willan, Jon Pointing and Paul Kaye. The premise: seven years after his partner Clea vanished, Michael follows his father's alchemical recipe to grow homunculi, tiny beings that can answer any question, including whether she is coming back.

We read four independent reviews, from the US, the UK and Australia. 9to5Mac reports a 100 per cent score on Rotten Tomatoes.

What did the reviewers say?

Daniel Fienberg in The Hollywood Reporter makes the biggest claim: that it may be the finest show to reach Apple this year, with the caveat that Widow's Bay is the competition. Fienberg singles out Quigley's lead as one of the year's best performances and Patel's as a breakout, and frames the show as Apple TV's first real success with magical realism after several misses.

Andrew Webster in The Verge calls it charming above all, a low-key show that is strong in nearly every regard, and argues it fills a gap in Apple's catalogue between the comfort of Ted Lasso and the horror of Widow's Bay. Webster notes the homunculi look more like stop-motion puppets than anything frightening.

Patrick Smith in The Independent, reviewing the BBC run, places it beside Crook's Detectorists: the same melancholy, now found in retail parks and overgrown suburban gardens. Smith praises Palin as Michael's father and the Quigley and Palin scenes in particular. Lenny Ann Low in The Age calls it a study of non-toxic masculinity and welcomes the closing words, to be continued, with relief. Low notes the stop-motion animation too.

Where they agree, and where they do not

All four agree on Quigley, on the tone, sad and funny at once, and on the pace being a strength rather than a fault. All four praise Patel. The disagreement is about what kind of show it is. Fienberg and Webster, reviewing for Apple's launch, file it as magical realism and compare it to Apple's own shows. Smith reads it as a Detectorists successor that happens to contain magic, and Low as a character study.

What none of them tested is how it lands with viewers who have never seen Detectorists and do not know the British suburban setting it depends on. That is the audience Apple has bought it for, and the reviews written for Americans are still by critics who know Crook's earlier work.

Our take

The reviews are about as uniform as television reviews get, and the four come from critics working in three countries over eight months, which makes the agreement more convincing than a single launch-week chorus. Apple's choice to buy a finished series is the more interesting signal. When we reported Apple setting 7 October for Small Prophets alongside Nocturne, the acquisition looked like a gap-filler. With a second series already commissioned, as MacRumors reported in September, and reviews like these, APPDOOK reads it as a cheaper way to add proven shows to a catalogue that was long criticised as thin, and we would expect Apple to do it again.