Apple TV’s Lucky begins with a betrayal and ends with a gift. In between are seven episodes of blithely derivative action fun, as unoriginal as they are expertly made. The show borrows from the Bourne movies (2002–2016), Catch Me If You Can (2002), Run Lola Run (1998), and even The Sopranos (1999–2007). The result is material that feels not fresh but well-loved, like a thrift-store find one can’t wait to take home.
The title character is Luciana “Lucky” Armstrong (Anya Taylor-Joy), the grown-up child of her criminal father, John (Timothy Olyphant). As the series opens, Lucky is in Las Vegas with her husband, Cary (Drew Starkey), and a pile of cash from one of dad’s scams. “Something feels off,” our heroine declares, revealing, not for the last time, an enviable sixth sense for mischief. She’s right. Within hours, Cary will abscond with the money, leaving Lucky to deal with the fallout on her own.
Apple’s production is a heist show without the heist. Indeed, I was never quite sure where the money came from in the first place, grasping only that (a) a biodiesel scheme was involved, and (b) both the FBI and the mob wanted the dough. The upshot is that an abandoned Lucky must run from everyone — not only Javert-like Special Agent Billie Rand (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) but crime lord Priscilla Masterson (Annette Bening), a ruthless figure who just happens to be Cary’s mother. “Ninety pounds soaking wet,” as a minor character puts it, Lucky must use her wits to evade capture, find her husband, and steal back the money that is wrongfully hers.
Taylor-Joy is exceptionally well cast in the lead. Possessed of an odd, elfin beauty, the 30-year-old star of the horror movie The Witch (2015) and the Netflix series The Queen’s Gambit (2020) is exactly the type to manipulate and unnerve the men and women whom Lucky encounters. Among the program’s strongest episodes is its second, in which the young con woman takes refuge with a formidable desert-dweller (a terrific Alanna Ubach) and her granddaughters. But note, too, the truck driver who helps Lucky halfway through the pilot. Absolutely certain he is being lied to, he offers her money all the same.
Lucky smartly emphasizes the bodily toll of life on the lam. Much credit is due to the production’s stunt coordinators, who toss their waifish lead around like so much tattered baggage. Prepare to wince. Yet the show’s writers know what they’re doing, too. Trapped mere inches from death in a thrilling scene, Lucky telephones John, who urges her to call again from safety. “I’m going to be in a better place,” a terrified Lucky agrees — not exactly the reassurance dad was looking for.
It is because of these physical disadvantages that our heroine’s flight from justice produces so many clever improvisations. Like Leonardo DiCaprio’s Frank Abagnale in Catch Me If You Can, Lucky needs little more than a name on a birthday card to execute a new scam. And like Jason Bourne, she is more than ready to use violence when talking fails. The difference is that the scrawny Lucky will not be dispatching assassins with a pen, as Bourne does in the first movie bearing his name. Rather, the young woman borrows that character’s brio, decision-making, and awareness of how little attention the average mark is actually paying to the world.
With one exception, the series is very well cast and acted. Olyphant, charmingly dangerous ever since 1999’s Go, summons much of his old roguishness as a man rightfully imprisoned for his crimes. I expected Bening to struggle as a Livia Soprano-type willing to “hit” her own son, but the 68-year-old surprised me: Her performance is menacing, vulnerable, and just campy enough to be fun. The weak link in all of this is Ellis-Taylor as Special Agent Rand, an officer so ham-fistedly “tough” that I prayed for her reassignment. Then again, she isn’t onscreen all that much. Perhaps the writers noticed her character wasn’t working and revised their scripts accordingly.
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Lucky is not, in any case, about cops and robbers but about fathers and daughters, mothers and sons. The show’s most complicated pairing is surely Priscilla and Cary, who together enact a codependency worthy of Shakespeare’s Volumnia and Coriolanus. (“Thy valiantness was mine; thou suck’st it from me.”) Its most appealing pairing may be Lucky and John, two peas in a felonious pod, held together by a strange, enduring loyalty. Having briefly hidden out at a random child’s birthday party, our protagonist recalls her own youth as a swindler in training. “Invisibility is a matter of environment,” John sagely advises in flashback. Don’t say your father never taught you anything.
One could hardly go wrong with a lead as reliable as Taylor-Joy and material this deliciously pulpy. Never mind that the show too often feels like a series of disconnected chase scenes; it has moxie, verve, style. Some will protest, of course, that it is a poor thing for stylishness if that condition can be achieved simply by filming a friendless ingenue sprinting about in a tank top. I won’t deny that our heroine needs some support. Nevertheless, the facts remain: She’s lovely, they’re malign, and everyone is having a great time. If that’s not good enough for a lazy weekend’s streaming, I don’t know what is.
Graham Hillard is the TV critic for the Washington Examiner magazine.