'Murderbot' Season 1 Review: Paul and Chris Weitz's Tepid Dark Comedy Is Too Mechanical
The new AppleTV+ series has the right pieces, but never clicks into place as memorable sci-fi.
Hey Decoding TV subscribers: We considered covering Apple TV+’s new show Murderbot week-to-week but after taking a closer look, we think a season 1 review makes the most sense. This review by Matt Goldberg is based on the first five episodes of Murderbot’s 10-episode first season. -David Chen
We love a dry, sardonic machine. There can be something endearing in the deadpan even when they’re trying to kill the crew like HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The gap between their emotional intelligence and their machine intelligence is a great place for comedy. Whether it’s the healing robot Baymax in Big Hero 6, the mopey Marvin in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or the irritated K-2SO in Rogue One, we like seeing our robots with a personality that still feels somewhat isolated from the full range of human emotions. Paul and Chris Weitz’s new Apple TV+ series Murderbot tries to fill that space, but continually plays like a clunkier model with jokes that don’t land and a tone that veers between the bland and bombastic. Just as the title character calls the hours of television he watches “content,” so too does Murderbot feel like filler on the Apple TV+ platform.
In typical streamer fashion, the show wastes no time getting to its central conceit rather than patiently laying groundwork. Within moments of Murderbot’s first episode, our main character (Alexander Skarsgård), a “SecUnit” created by a corporation to guard its various interplanetary interests, tells us he’s found a way around his programming so that he now has free will. Instead of chasing new opportunities, he decides to keep this newfound freedom a secret for fear that if he’s discovered, he’ll be melted down for scrap and biomatter. Luckily for the SecUnit, who decides to rechristen himself “Murderbot” (but only to himself), his new assignment is with a bunch of scientist hippies who only bring him along so they the insurance company will bond their endeavor. Always irritated with the surrounding humans, Murderbot still finds himself compelled to protect them from the planet’s hazards as well as a greater, mysterious threat that imperils the lives of the entire crew.
The setup here is solid and makes for some obvious tension. I’m not surprised the source material, Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries series of books, was popular and critically acclaimed, but the Weitzes’ rendering here always feels like striking with a dulled blade. Our human characters are mostly pleasant and inoffensive (unlike the “assholes” on Murderbot’s previous assignment), but because they’re a little touchy-feely, Murderbot’s inner monologue is always snippy and pointed, like a moody teenager stuck at a family reunion. Murderbot’s personality is supposed to give the series its edge, but the writing continually falls flat. His zingers never play as particularly sharp, and his perpetual disdain never matches the pitch of his anodyne and mundane behavior of the surrounding humans. It would be one thing if Murderbot were stuck in an outsized situation like a commune or other radically liberal environment, but the scientists are mostly painted as left-leaning, inoffensive, and polite. They’re unique because the surrounding world of the corporation is so cold and cruel, not because there’s anything extreme in their behavior.
What’s strange is that the Weitzes seem like they want to go bigger, but they keep the real world bland while making the biggest, silliest sci-fi soap possible with the show-within-a-show, “The Rise & Fall of Sanctuary Moon.” From what we see, it plays like the original Star Trek crossed with Days of Our Lives and maximum color saturation. Those scenes are brief and charming, but it also feels like where the show is having the most fun. We then have to return to the bland beiges, browns, and pale whites of the real world, where all we have left is Murderbot’s running commentary to keep us amused.
You may have noticed that the robots I mentioned in the introduction are all supporting characters. Their limited emotions help to hone what we get from our human characters through juxtaposition. Putting the wry robot as the lead makes for a tricky proposition because all the humans exist externally to his perspective. Murderbot is purposefully keeping the crew at a distance so they won’t learn he’s gone rogue, but that also leaves him, as well as the viewer, at a bit of a distance from everyone else. You may get a bit of personality from Noma Dumezweni as Mensah, the team’s leader, and from David Dastmalchian, whose Gurathin has cybernetic implants that allow him to communicate with machines, but after five episodes, I still couldn’t tell you much about the other four scientists.
Even the larger mysteries feel fairly rote. We know Murderbot has some sort of traumatic incident from his past that he’s struggling to unlock, and there’s a larger threat involving other SecUnits becoming violent and why they may want to target this team in particular, but those play as grist to keep the plot moving rather than anything that would challenge or change our characters. Like other streaming shows, Murderbot rushes the pilot to get you hooked, drags out the plotting to reach a set season length, and then wraps each episode with a mild cliffhanger so you won’t abandon the autoplay. It’s not a great sign when your most compelling element is having short episodes so that the viewers never feel like they’re making much of a time commitment.
Murderbot isn’t a bad show, but it feels like one where the individual ingredients were never cooked into a satisfying meal. Despite some impressive VFX and production design, there’s no heart at the center of this tin man, and snarky voice-over comments about the action and story will only take you so far. This series needed an edge and a point of view, but what it has instead is always going for the most obvious route at all times. For a show about a robot who breaks free from his programming, Murderbot always comes off as woefully automated.
The first two episodes of Murderbot premiere on AppleTV+ on Friday, May 16th. New episodes arrive on AppleTV+ every Friday through July 11th. Matt Goldberg is a film critic who lives and works in Atlanta. If you enjoyed this review, check out his newsletter, Commentary Track.