“The Morning Show,” with its slick surface and murderously expensive cast, is the gleaming shell designed to entice you to buy Apple TV Plus. Other inaugural series on the new streaming service — the hinkier and less star-driven “Dickinson,” “For All Mankind” and “See” — are the apps Apple needs you to get addicted to, so that you’ll keep paying. Here’s a look.

‘For All Mankind’

If a story has been famously and repeatedly told — as recently as in the spate of moon-landing documentaries that filled TV screens this summer — how do you justify telling it again? Ronald D. Moore and his collaborators in this big, old-fashioned, 10-episode retelling of the space race came up with an easy solution: They changed the story, having the Soviet Union sneak a couple of cosmonauts onto the moon just before the launch of Apollo 11.

That alteration of history has a couple of payoffs for Moore, who’s demonstrated his skill with pulpy, sweeping pop entertainments before in “Battlestar Galactica” and “Outlander.” It gives him a plausible, organic way to put women at the center of the NASA narrative, and even on the moon. Overall, the show works with and against the currents of history to highlight female and gay characters in ways that feel less tacked-on and obligatory than in a lot of other period dramas. (The same can’t be said for an immigration subplot that, through eight episodes, feels superfluous and, in its likening of the cross-border journey to the across-space journey, alarmingly on the nose.)

Putting the Russians back into the race has a pure dramatic benefit, too: It makes everything dangerous again, in contrast to the procession of problem-free real-life landings (Apollo 13 aside) that the American public quickly lost interest in. The show’s alt-NASA cuts corners and rushes decisions to meet the public-relations needs of Richard Nixon and his (surprise) successor. The amplified pressure leads to breakdown and death among the Apollo astronauts.