An unstoppable killer android has decided it doesn't really want to do all that murdering any more and has decided to strike out on its own, with a personal mission to stay low and watch as much TV as possible. But the self-styled "Murderbot" is drawn into a survey mission on a planet that goes wrong, and discovers that keeping its identity a secret is going to be very difficult.
Murderbot is an Apple TV+ adaptation of Martha Wells's award-festooned Murderbot Diaries series of novellas and short novels, depicting the adventures of the titular Murderbot (note: does not do that much murdering). This first season of ten (short) episodes adapts All Systems Red, the (very short) first book in the series, but adds a lot of new material to flesh out the story.
As adaptations go, Murderbot is solid. I was wary of Alexander Skarsgård's casting as Murderbot, not because of any lack of acting skill, but because I'd always seen Murderbot as a much more anonymous character and Skarsgård has one of the most recognisable faces on television. I shouldn't have had such doubts as Skarsgård is excellent, delivering a performance that is simultaneously very human and very inhuman at the same time. The next-most-famous castmember is the splendid David Dastmalchian as Gurathin, the science team member most suspicious of Murderbot, who does a great job of making Gurathin seem like both a threat and a potential ally. But it's Noma Dumezweni's empathetic performance as Mensah that emerges as the most important, giving the team a strong moral core and Murderbot something to aspire to.
The cast is exemplerary, and this is backed up by the physical production. The show manages to feel appropriately futuristic without the generic vaguely iMac-inspired design a lot of SF shows settle on these days. Production design is impressive, and the effects are, as you'd expect these guys, very good, with a strong sense of physicality even to the all-CGI parts of the battle sequences to make them feel more real.
The show's biggest challenge might be its tone. The Murderbot books are inherently dramatic with a comedic edge to them, but the TV show perhaps leans into the comedy a bit more. This keeps the show feeling light, even its darker moments, and maybe risking being a bit too lightweight. It's again Skarsgård who helps this by ensuring the melancholic and even tragic aspects of Murderbot's situation come through.
The show's biggest comic success is its depiction of the show-within-a-show, Sanctuary Moon, in which surprisingly big hitters (like John Cho, Clark Gregg, DeWanda Wise and Jack McBrayer) get into ludicrous hijinks in short excerpts from Murderbot's favourite media. It feels inevitable at some point that we'll get to see a full episode of this madcap show.
More controversial are the short episode lengths, with most episodes only clocking in at half an hour, some less. This is an unavoidable side-effect of having ten episodes to adapt such a short (sub-150 pages) book. In retrospect it might have been better to have had five hour-long episodes, or to have binge-released the series rather than stretching it out over ten weeks, which risked becoming interminable.
The show does get better as it goes along, and the last few episodes where Murderbot has less to hide and more to sacrifice for its newfound friends, make for a compelling end to the season. But it will be interesting to see where the show goes from here, given the new few books are also extremely short.
Murderbot: Season 1 (****) is available to watch now globally on Apple TV+. A second season is in production right now for airing in 2027. Meanwhile, the eighth Murderbot book, Platform Decay, is due out later this month.
