Subscribing to every streaming service out there is not an option for most people. It just isn’t. They’re too expensive, there are too many, and it’s also just a lot of work to keep track of so many options and apps and interfaces. Some folks pick and choose, while some folks use the rotation method (service #1 for a few months to catch up, then service #2 for a few months to watch their stuff, and so forth).

Apple TV+ is free this weekend for anybody who has an Apple ID. It’s a service that has not taken off the way some people thought it might, despite having some successes — Ted Lasso in particular. I’m not here to tell you to pick this service over any other one, or to pay for it at all. But I am here to give you a little advice on what might be worth using this free weekend to catch, since they’re giving it away.

Some things (aside from Ted Lasso) have gotten a ton of good press already. Severance is a spooky, beautifully designed drama/sci-fi story about the drudgery of office life, and it’s starting again in a couple weeks, so now could be the perfect time to catch up. Pachinko is a really moving saga based on Min Jin Lee’s novel of the same name. My current favorite show, if I had to name one, is Shrinking, a very funny and often very emotionally rich story about a bunch of great characters, many of them therapists — it also features my favorite Harrison Ford performance in years and years and years. Bad Sisters, especially the first season, is a delicious and fabulously performed story of devoted siblings getting the better of a terrible, terrible husband.

Other favorites of the TV critics I know: Dickinson, Slow Horses, For All Mankind, Silo, and this year’s Cate Blanchett drama Disclaimer. And they’ve got movies, too: Coda won best picture at the 2022 Oscars, after all.

But maybe you feel like “yes, yes, I’ve heard of all those things.” So let me spotlight a handful of other Apple offerings that haven’t gotten quite as much attention that you might enjoy.

• The Afterparty: This series stars a murderer’s row of comic actors — in the first season it was folks like Sam Richardson, Ben Schwartz, John Early, Ike Barinholtz, Tiya Sircar and Ilana Glazer — in an actual murder mystery that takes place at a high school reunion. Every episode is done in a different genre (musical, action picture, rom-com). It’s a lot of fun, and if you enjoy comic mysteries as much as I do, it might be right up your alley. 

• Platonic: I was a big fan of this show, starring Seth Rogen and Rose Byrne as best friends who reunite after a long time out of touch. It’s really funny, but it also has a nice feel for actual platonic friendships (it is not about whether they are going to kiss) and their complications. If you like your comedies to be proudly and brightly funny rather than heavy and high-concept, give it a shot. 
• Sharper: This film is a thriller that I feel like absolutely nobody saw except me — but again, it was right up my alley. It’s a twisty story about New York scammers starring Julianne Moore, Sebastian Stan and Justice Smith. There are reversals and betrayals and ooh, it was kinda fun. 
• Flora and Son: This movie is about a single mom, played by Eve Hewson, who takes guitar lessons remotely with a laid-back guy played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It was written and directed by John Carney, who made Once and Sing Street, so you are in good hands. He just has a way with big musical moments, and I really enjoyed where this one ended up. 
• Boys State and Girls State: Boys State and Girls State are twin documentaries about leadership programs for high school students, and both are absorbing and sobering, particularly when seen side-by-side. 

This piece also appeared in NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour newsletter. Sign up for the newsletter so you don’t miss the next one, plus get weekly recommendations about what’s making us happy.

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As a student, like many of us, I liked to read Henry David Thoreau. Many of his ringing one-liners thrilled me and got copied down in my commonplace book, but there was one sentence I hardly registered: “Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour.” In my early 20s, my life was all about action, movement, exploration: Contemplation was for the aged in their rocking chairs.

Within a few years, though, real life began to catch up with me: I’d completed my first four years in an office; I’d fallen in love with the woman I was going to marry; I’d been lucky enough to see much of the globe, from Cuba to Tibet. More dramatically, my house had burned to the ground in a wildfire, and I’d lost not only all my possessions, but also the handwritten notes that were the basis for my next three books. My future, in short, as much as my past.

After weeks of sleeping on the floor of a friend’s house, I made my way up (at another friend’s suggestion) to a Benedictine hermitage, four hours north along the California coast, just south of the hamlet of Lucia. I would try to forget that 15 years of Anglican schooling as a boy in England had left me most interested in traditions from the far side of the world. What I found at the top of the mountain, the minute I stepped out of my car, was a radiant view over the blue Pacific, freedom from all distraction (no TV, no cellphones, no internet) and a day that seemed to last for months. I could read, take walks, scribble off letters or, best of all, do nothing at all. The roar of the highway was far below, and for most of the day, even amid birdsong and tolling bells, the main sound was of living silence.

I’d stumbled, in short, into the realm of contemplation. I’ve never meditated, and as a writer on place, I was often in motion, crisscrossing the globe every week. But now I was invited just to sit and watch — not as I did when writing, but with no end in sight at all. And not to think, since my thoughts subsided as soon as I left clamor behind; just to attend. To observe the world, perhaps, as if it were the central scripture.

The results were quite startling. I was no longer angry with that friend I’d been raging against when I drove up; he, too, was probably just trying to find some peace in an overstressed life. Memories rose up — sometimes poignant, sometimes erotic and piercing — and they held and possessed me as they never could when I was driving along the freeway, preoccupied with my next appointment. Death itself didn’t seem quite so terrifying in a landscape of rock and redwood and unbroken ocean — and in a silence that seemed no less changeless. It was instant joy, in short, the kind that lingers even when things are difficult.

I was being asked to offer just $30 a night, which covered hot lunches, hot showers, books and fruit and salad and bread, and the most heart-expanding views along the famously beautiful coastline I’d ever discovered.

It’s not surprising, perhaps, that very soon I reserved a trailer on the hillside for two weeks, and then three. The monks were great company and bracingly undogmatic; they were confident each of us would find what we needed here, whatever names we chose to give to it. I could drive down to a pay phone at the motel along the highway if an emergency arose — but emergencies are never so common as we imagine. Of course it was not easy to leave my mother or my wife-to-be behind, but it felt worthwhile if I could bring back to them someone who was fresh and attentive and brimming with delight, and not the distracted and overburdened soul they otherwise saw, grumbling, “Not right now!”

At the same time, I could never ignore that sentence in Thoreau, whom I was reading much more carefully now in silence: How to make my life worthy of what I saw and who I was — and wasn’t — in this space of contemplation? I wasn’t a monk and never would be. My mother was calling for company after her husband’s sudden death; my loved ones in Japan needed emotional as well as financial support; I had to pay the bills.

Maybe I could try to remake my life a little in the light of what I’d seen in silence? I surprised both my sweetheart and myself by moving to Japan and a tiny, two-room apartment, crowded with her, her 12-year-old son and her 10-year-old daughter; I’d realized, as Thoreau reminded me, that “a man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to leave alone.” In this cramped space, I’d have the luxury of living without a car or a big house, free of constant distractions. I began to pick up some of the wise writers in the Western tradition — Meister Eckhart, Etty Hillesum — no longer convinced that Sufis or Buddhists owned a monopoly on wisdom. And I resolved to try to go on retreat for three days every season, simply to clear my head, root myself in what mattered and remember what I loved.

Plus, of course, to get perspective on the world and my life in it, none of which I could see in the midst of all the tumult. Some friends take runs every day, or swims, for the same reason; some cook or sew or golf. Almost any practice that allows you to open space in your day and your head seems invaluable, especially as the world accelerates, but it was a particular luxury to spend three days and nights with nothing I had to do. Even on holiday, I’m usually captive to my plans.

As the years went on — there have been almost 34 of them now, and more than 100 retreats — the nature of my days in silence began to mature. Not only did silence bring those I cared about close to me — and clearer — than they might be when in the same room; it also turned the strangers along the monastery road into trusted friends. We were all here for a common purpose, and it wasn’t usually a text or a teacher or even a doctrine; it was simply a human longing (or intimation). I grew ever closer to the monks, a wildly talented and friendly collection of scholars, musicians, artists and chemists; I realized I had a connection with everyone met in silence — even if I knew next to nothing of their jobs or their backgrounds — that I seldom had with people met along a busy sidewalk.

I came to understand what Thoreau knew, like all contemplatives: The point of being alone is to be able to give more to others and to be a more useful member of society. “I am naturally no hermit,” he had written in “Walden”; “I think that I love society as much as most.” I didn’t tell anyone to go to my particular retreat, but I did sometimes remind friends that three days away from distraction could clarify their lives. Those who had spent time in silence weren’t surprised when I explained that it was being alone in the ringing quiet that moved me, at long last, and at the not-so-tender age of 42, to get married.

I never regret my life in the world, chronicling its movements and the explosion of possibilities our grandparents could not have imagined. But I hope never to stop returning to my friends in the Hermitage; at times I’ve even stayed with the monks in their Enclosure, there seeing that their lives are all hard work and constant activity to ensure that their guests can enjoy absolute peace. I can’t imagine a more important investment.

One day I was making my little trailer clean, polishing its every surface and wiping the sink down till it shone — as I seldom do at home — when I noticed something that stayed with me (no detail seems trivial in silence). I had to squeeze only a single drop of dishwashing liquid into my glass of water and the whole thing turned blue. It doesn’t take much to transform a life.

Pico Iyer is the author of “The Art of Stillness” and the forthcoming “Aflame: Learning From Silence.”

Britt Allcroft, creator of the beloved Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends children’s TV series, has died.

The British-born producer died last week in Santa Monica, Calif., at 81.

The death was confirmed by Brannon Carty, the creator of a documentary about Thomas fandom and a friend of the TV producer’s. No cause of death was given.

Thomas started out as a character in a series of books dating back to the 1940s by Rev. Wilbert Awdry, an English Anglican minister and train enthusiast. Awdry’s The Railway Series revolved around a cast of anthropomorphic trains, including Thomas and his friends Gordon, James and Percy, all chuffing along on the imaginary island of Sodor.

But Allcroft made Thomas an international sensation, starting in the mid-1980s with her TV adaptation narrated by Ringo Starr.

The series, which was later renamed Thomas & Friends, ran for more than three decades and featured other famous narrators such as George Carlin and Alec Baldwin. It has spawned TV spin-offs, movies, stage productions and a ton of merch.

Television producer and director Britt Allcroft in 1973.

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And the appeal goes beyond kids. The 2023 documentary An Unlikely Fandom is about grownups’ passion for the little blue locomotive.

Filmmaker Brannon Carty — a lifelong Thomas fan — said he got to know Allcroft in her final years.

“She was just an incredible woman who was still a child at heart,” Carty said in an interview with NPR. “But she was a businesswoman at the same time. So, she understood what children wanted, and also knew how to sell it.” 

Allcroft was born in 1943 in Worthing, a town on England’s south coast.

Beyond Thomas, her 1990s animated series Magic Adventures of Mumfie, about a sweet little gray elephant and his friends, was a particular hit.

“I wanted to do something very different from Thomas that would be very magical and epic and hopefully have lots of music in it, and would, in the same way as Thomas, help give children love, and security, and inspiration, and comfort, and fun,” Allcroft told NPR in a 2013 interview.

Allcroft also said she aimed to create shows that gave children an antidote to hectic modern life.

“Children, they’re multidimensional,” she said. “And they still like that time where they can be with their stories, be with their characters, and feel that they’re not being pushed.”

Thomas the Tank Engine arrives for Thomas & Friends: A Day Out with Thomas Tour at Strasburg Rail Road Museum in September 2014 in Lancaster County, Pa.

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