Folks? I'm worried about Murderbot.
Murderbot is an Apple TV+ show that premieres Friday, dropping the first two episodes of its 10 episode season. It's about a robot played by Alexander Skarsgård rented by a team of planetary scientists to work security on their expedition. Unbeknownst to them, it's more than a robot – it's gained sentience, and wants nothing more than to be left alone so it can watch the thousands of episodes of TV shows it's downloaded.
… Relatable.
It knows that its gaining of free will would be considered a malfunction, and would result in it being scrapped for parts. So it pretends to be the unthinking, dutiful machine they rented, even as it silently, and hilariously, judges the humans it's protecting for being impractical, unsafe, naive and (from its perspective) wildly emotional.
I'm worried because it's on Apple TV+, that most walled-garden of all streamers. Only a handful of shows like Severance, Ted Lasso and The Morning Show have managed to clamber over that wall and become hits in the wider culture. Murderbot deserves the mainstream success of Severance; I worry it will suffer the fate of, say, The Big Door Prize, a fun Apple TV+ series that still earns blank stares from everyone I recommend it to. (NPR's Eric Deggans agrees with me; he's worried, too.)
I'm confident that Murderbot will find a small audience. Readers of the series of novels it's based on, The Murderbot Diaries, by Martha Wells, will be inclined to watch.
Fans of science fiction who've never read the books might check it out, too. And then there are the kind of people drawn to anything with a title like Murderbot. They'll watch, and they'll likely stick around.
I'm not worried about who will watch Murderbot. I'm worried about who won't. Which is: People looking for a funny, smart, humanist, stealthily sweet comedy. That is to say: Pretty much everybody, no?
Even if they decide to check it out, they might be fooled by the opening minutes of the pilot, which take place in exactly the world you'd expect a show called Murderbot to be set in: That same dark, boringly dystopian-industrial science-fiction milieu we've been served up for decades now. Metal grating walkways? Check. Weirdly wet floors? Check. Mining equipment? Superfluous, intermittent showers of welding sparks? Check and check.
But then the tone shifts. Suddenly we're on a bright, arid-but-airy planet outside a geodesic habitat painted in bold, friendly colors. We meet the scientists who have rented Murderbot. (They refer to Skarsgård's character as Security Unit, or SecUnit for short; "Murderbot" is the name the robot calls itself.)
(... Not because it's homicidal, but because it thinks it sounds cool.)
(... It's right.)
The scientists turn out to be a bunch of space-hippies, given to spontaneous drum circles and the ceaseless validation of each other's feelings. They wear overalls and cream-colored natural fibers and harbor enlightened views about their SecUnit, whom they treat as a person. At one point, on a long trip, the team leader, the acutely and hilariously empathetic Dr. Mensah (Noma Dumezweni) starts telling it about her children. SecUnit, of course, must remain impassive, robotic – but watch Skarsgård's eyebrows. Ever so slightly, they furrow – conveying SecUnit's acute alarm and growing distress at having this human get her messy, sticky feelings all over it.
Reader, I guffawed.
I laughed a lot, watching Murderbot, and admired how much the show gets right from the jump. SecUnit offers a running commentary on the action, so the show is awash in voiceover. But that voiceover is used, never relied upon. It's always employed in ways that individualize and particularize SecUnit's character, which often manifests in jokes that undercut the events we're watching through its eyes.
About those space-hippies. There are a lot of jokes at their expense, but they're not the kind of lazy, lay-up, make-fun-of-the-wokes jokes. They're specific, and so firmly rooted in character that they allow each member of the team to distinguish themselves from each other, to be weird in their own particular way. The great David Dastmalchian plays the squirrelly Dr. Gurathin, a cybernetically augmented human who can sense that something is up with SecUnit. Sabrina Wu and Tattiawna Jones play a married couple who, between attacks by monstrous space-centipedes and raids by rogue SecUnits, find the time and infinite patience to invite the team's resident bluff, overconfident himbo (a very funny Akshay Khanna) into their relationship.
(Comedy ringers like Jack McBrayer, John Cho and Pen15's Anna Konkle also turn up, in ways that are much too fun to spoil.)
I should mention that Murderbot features sudden and sporadic violence, but it's not used in the glib, nihilistic way it's used on The Boys, or in the Deadpool franchise. Death isn't just a toss-away gag, here. There's one (admittedly funny) act of violence midway through the season, for example, that doesn't get dismissed or downplayed – it lingers, and the characters keep dealing with it in the next episode, and the one after that. Because that's how humans work.
Between the team's emotional messiness and SecUnit's fragile diffidence, which starts to crumble as it spends more time with these idiots (that's the "stealthily sweet" bit I mentioned above), Murderbot has managed the impossible. It's found a way to take the oldest, most tired, most overused premise in all of science-fiction – What does it mean … to be human? – and mine it for comedy gold.
So, yeah. Murderbot is the best comedy series I've seen this year and I'm gonna be shouting that from the rooftops. Check out the episodes that drop Friday on Apple TV+. If you like them, do me a favor, because we need to get the word out about this show:
Meet me on the roof.
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