“Artificial intelligence” is a tech fantasist’s dream bubble, but let’s play along. Suppose tomorrow’s robots have human intelligence, self-directedness, and skill. Won’t they have our laziness, as well? Murderbot, the latest science-fiction series from Apple TV+, attempts to answer precisely that question. The popular fear is of machines that slay us in our beds. Apple’s latest is about an android that just wants to watch TV.
The show stars Alexander Skarsgård, the brooding Swede who played tech bro Lukas Matsson in the last two seasons of Succession. Here, Skarsgård is a bodyguard bot by the uninspired name of Security Unit 238776431. When, in a flash of revelation, our hero hacks his “governor module,” he is suddenly, blissfully free of all programming constraints. The only thing missing is a better handle. “Freedom Unit”? “Rogue Bot”? No and no. “Murderbot”? Hells to the yeah. As an exuberant Skarsgård howls in voiceover, “Let the adventure begin!”
That adventure, such as it is, commences when a team of misfits secures Murderbot’s services for a planetary expedition. Aware that his condition will raise human hackles, the android hides his autonomy behind a neutral affect and passes the time streaming galactic soaps. If The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, Murderbot’s favorite, were the whole show, I might quickly become addicted. It features the always reliable Clark Gregg and looks charming. The problem is that Murderbot has its own unknowable ambitions. Neither fish nor fowl, the series lurches between ideas and tones like a broken cyborg shooting sparks.
Other prestige “comedies” have had this problem before. Like Maya Rudolph’s Loot, still running elsewhere on Apple, Murderbot lacks the social realism of a drama but has no actual laughs. Like HBO’s tech-skewering Made for Love, the new show is able neither to explore its subject’s ethical questions nor have a joke at their expense. The Jetsons, the much-loved Hanna-Barbera production of my youth, is not only funnier than Murderbot but looks better to boot. A space centipede in Apple’s pilot would have been dismissed as hokey by Fritz Lang (b. 1890). So might our protagonist himself, whose face-revealing skin suit owes far too much to superior productions: Ex Machina, Star Trek: First Contact, even Robocop.
What Murderbot has in spades are political “virtues,” a time-capsule allotment of wokeness that would have felt dated three years ago. With the exception of the lead, every character is interchangeably androgynous and brown. The single marriage shown on-screen is between the “nonbinary” Pin-Lee (Sabrina Wu) and their wife, Arada (Tattiawna Jones). Team leader Mensah (Noma Dumezweni) makes reference to her “spouses” back home. These are sops to the base, yes, but they are also substitutes for any real characterization. “The good news is, everyone is gay!!” wrote queer-progressive weblog Autostraddle in its review of the new show. All right, fine. But must everyone also be instantly forgettable?
What actually happens on Murderbot adds little in the way of interest. Exploring a distant world, expedition members dodge the aforementioned centipedes and pursue unmapped territories. A second security unit makes an appearance, as does a survivor of a doomed rival team. Though familiar, these sci-fi plotting standards have inspired hours of middlebrow fun on better shows. See, for example, basically any episode of Battlestar Galactica. Here, the “action” is a mere skeleton supporting the flesh of left-psychological preoccupations. Murderbot is neurodivergent-coded and can’t look people in the eye. Mensah has panic attacks. Are our heroes cosmic adventurers or undergrads on an otherworldly quad?
Perhaps Murderbot’s most notable characteristic is its exemplification of what has hitherto been Apple’s winning strategy. Like recent sci-fi adaptations Dark Matter and Silo, the new series comes with a preassembled audience of book readers — in this case, fans of Martha Wells’s collection of novels. The difference, however, is that Murderbot’s genre predecessors know exactly what they are and offer up admirable thematic and tonal coherence. Apple’s latest venture is, by comparison, a weird, jaded mess. Its setup gag, a slothful robot, has legs, but the show never does anything meaningful with the idea. Worse still, it behaves as if inclusive casting is the whole entertainment battle. Those who agree will find much to like here.
Indeed, Murderbot may turn out to be one of those shows that no left-leaning critic can publicly dislike. Little else explains its ecstatic reception, which certainly has nothing to do with the program’s quality. Take, for instance, the Boston Globe’s cringeworthy coverage: “At a time when the country’s Secretary of Health and Human Services is pushing unproven and damaging theories about autism, the fact that there’s a show … whose protagonist has already been embraced by many in the neurodivergent community certainly counts for something.”
Friends, no. “Representation” to one side, Murderbot is exactly the kind of series we shouldn’t be making: unserious, unamusing, and beholden to yesterday’s ideology. Forget about taking over the world. This is one robot that can’t find the scrap heap quickly enough.
Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.