Murderbot is The Most Hilariously Relatable Sci-Fi Show In Years

Don’t let the title of Murderbot fool you. The titular cyborg Security Unit, or “SecUnit” who narrates the series is hardly a murder machine. Instead, the moniker “Murderbot” is a nickname this cyborg gives itself after it secretly deactivates the one aspect of its programming, its governor module, that makes it a slave. If back-talking R2-D2 ditched its restraining bolt, looked like Alexander Skarsgård, and presented us with a hilarious inner monologue, the result might be something a bit like the new Apple TV+ series.

Murderbot is both a familiar-ish science fiction series but also something utterly brand new. It's a workplace comedy, a space opera, and a robot show all rolled into one. Apple TV+ almost certainly has a sleeper hit on its hands, assuming sci-fi fans pay attention.

Based on All Systems Red, the first book in author Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries, the new 10-episode season from Apple TV+ stars Skarsgård as a kind of cyborg/robot narrator that a science fiction series has never quite seen before. Although the plotting and tone of the show are fairly close to the slightly tongue-in-cheek source material, showrunners Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz have collaborated with Skarsgård to make something even warmer and more inviting than the easily digestible novellas from which this all comes. Whereas Wells’ books felt like a really solid inside joke for SF readers, the TV series casts a bigger, more welcoming net that both does justice to the books, but also — dare I say it — makes the characters even more vibrant.

The set-up here is fairly simple, and for those who haven’t read the books, perhaps the best way to think about Murderbot is what if you were in one of those Doctor Who episodes in which a bumbling and chatty survey team was in over their head on a dangerous planet. But instead of a Time Lord coming to save everyone’s asses, you’ve got a cranky SecUnit, who is also handsome as hell because it’s played by Alexander Skarsgård. The dialogue in Murderbot is relentlessly realistic, which often makes it quite funny, but also makes off-the-rack sci-fi tropes feel new and compelling.

Without giving away too much of the actual plot, the 10 episodes of Murderbot feel like a workplace comedy because of the setup. Somewhere in the future, in which humanity has spread out to various planets under different corporate jurisdictions, SecUnit is assigned to a naive and sweet survey team from an area of space called PreservationAux. Unlike other heartless human settlements, the PreservationAux people are kinder and more open-minded, which means their group leader, Dr. Mensah (Noma Dumezweni), is more willing to view SecUnit as a person than, say, various other humans it’s worked with before.

This begrudging mutual respect takes up much of the narrative, which a Star Trek fan will likely see as a version of “What if Data was a Sassy Grump?” And, in a sense, there’s something very Star Trek in the twinkle of the ideological principles of Mensah and the rest of the PreservationAux gang. Alongside Dumezweni, the rest of the cast — David Dastmalchian, Tattiawna Jones, Sabrina Wu, Tamara Podemski, and Akshay Khanna — are a delightful group of lonely humanists, keeping their heads up in a galaxy of greedy bastards.

Murderbot definitely builds its own world fairly convincingly, but it helps that it winks a bit at other well-known science fiction. The Star Trek references don’t fully end with the ideological bones of the show; there’s also the in-universe soap opera that Murderbot loves to stream: The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, which brilliantly features Trek alum John Cho as an over-the-top, and deeply funny, Captain Kirk-like figure. One of the funniest jokes about Sanctuary Moon comes in an episode in which Murderbot defends one of the sillier episodes of the series, saying simply, “It’s canon.” If you know, you know.

These jokes and the warmth of Murderbot will be what makes you want to stay for the entirety of the show. But the thing that will lure you in is the excellent pacing and stand-out dialogue. Murderbot may not be a sci-fi future we actually want to live in, but the series itself feels like a place where you already know everyone. It’s not quite a sitcom and not quite a drama. Murderbot is kidding, but also serious. It’s a true genre mash-up and one of the best times a sci-fi fan can have streaming this year.

Murderbot airs its first two episodes on May 16 on Apple TV+. Subsequent episodes drop on Fridays for 10 episodes in total.