Watching the credits roll on Apple TV’s gonzo alternate-reality comedy Brothers, I looked hard for the name of Charlie Kaufman. Surely the Oscar-winning screenwriter of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) and other surrealist classics was involved in Apple’s unhinged send-up of family, politics, and the contemporary celebrity experience.
After all, Kaufman’s screenwriting debut, Being John Malkovich (1999), paved much of the ground that Brothers has trod since its premiere in September. In both productions, famous actors cast aside their dignity for the sake of the gag. Both make their bones on viewers’ suspicion that celebrities behave exactly thus when off-screen. Fans of the Kaufman-penned film will recall, for instance, a towel-clad John Malkovich prancing around Catherine Keener’s bedroom while “possessed” by John Cusack. Though it’s been a while since I partied in the Hollywood Hills, I assume that sort of thing goes on all the time.
Brothers’ version of the joke stars Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as codependent besties balancing work and life in election-season Texas. Conforming to type and then some, Harrelson plays “Woody” as a flighty pothead forever addled by the expectations of his wife and daughters. “Matthew,” meanwhile, is a cloyingly “spiritual” buffoon whose idea of formal religiosity is to adapt the Book of Ecclesiastes after a hunt. (“There is a time to eat a deer heart, and there is a time not to eat a deer heart.”)
When, making good on a real-life threat, the McConaughey character enters the Texas gubernatorial race, Harrelson joins the campaign as an adviser and offerer of emotional support. But there’s a catch: Following a revelation from Matthew’s steel magnolia of a mother (a winning Holland Taylor), Woody comes to suspect that the duo’s longstanding “brotherhood” may not be as metaphorical as he once believed.
Much of Brothers’ season-long arc follows the consequences of this unlikely twist. Afraid that Matthew will react badly to his deceased father’s false paternity, Woody declines to inform his friend of the news. Yet that hesitancy fails to extend to scruples about, say, stealing Matthew’s bodily fluids for a peek at his DNA. Other plot lines are equally absurd, among them the travails of an irritably boweled puppy and an episode-length prank war that lands Matthew and Woody in jail. The show’s greatest joy, however, lies simply in the superb “fraternal” chemistry shared by two of the most likable actors currently plying their trade.
We have seen McConaughey and Harrelson onscreen together before, of course, most recently in the 2014 debut season of True Detective, still one of the greatest TV runs of the modern era. Strip away that production’s virtuosic cinematography and pacing, and one is left with two cops who might as well be related, so intractably quarrelsome is their rapport. It isn’t quite, or isn’t just, that the characters don’t like one another. It’s that the 17 years over which their saga unfolds forge a bond too deep to be disrupted by the vagaries of personality.
Something similar is happening on Apple’s new show. Like an exhausted couples therapist, Brothers asks us to consider whether actually getting along is all that important in relationships that last half a lifetime. A preening narcissist, Matthew holds Woody in obvious disdain and pecks at him as ruthlessly as a Texas rooster. Woody, for his part, is the houseguest from hell, parking his luxury trailer on McConaughey’s lawn and refusing to leave. Nevertheless, the two men finish each other’s sentences, dress identically when the mood strikes them, and generally have a heck of a good time. Granted, everything I’m describing is scripted, but one can’t help assuming that real “brotherly” love undergirds the TV fun.
The show’s other cast members are no slouches themselves. Holland Taylor, already mentioned, has such infectious fun as the poison-tongued “Ma Mac” that one wishes she would run for office. Imagine former Texas Gov. Ann Richards without the midlife turn toward sobriety. Young actors Nolan Almeida and Oona Yaffe shine as Matthew’s good-natured son and Woody’s cynical daughter, respectively. Go ahead and mail the “Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series” Emmy to comedian Lisa Gilroy, who runs away with her scenes as the ponderously named Gwen Hillcrest Barnes-Davies, Matthew’s half-insane campaign manager. Note to Apple: Give this woman a spinoff series immediately (Gwen!), or miss an opportunity.
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Indeed, Gilroy’s finest moment, Episode 4’s hilarious cold open, doubles as the series’s most perfect scene. There, screening an ad that burnishes McConaughey’s “Christianity” with a clip from 1994’s Angels in the Outfield, Barnes-Davies and Matthew bicker fruitlessly over the uses of fame in political campaigns. According to Gilroy’s character, the matter is simple: The public could give a damn about “substance” and “just wants to see that [appealing posterior] in some bike shorts.” Matthew, meanwhile, is a prisoner to his own delusions. His New York Times bestsellers, his successful tequila brand, his visiting professorship at UT Austin: “Was any of that achieved because of my celebrity?”
If writing of that kind doesn’t make you laugh, I don’t know what to tell you. I found Brothers to be delightful, a worthy successor to Being John Malkovich despite, no luck, Kaufman’s absence from the production staff. As for Apple’s next trick, I hear rumors that Sydney Sweeney and Janeane Garofalo might share a mom or dad. Sisters, anyone?
Graham Hillard is the TV critic for the Washington Examiner magazine.