[Image: Alexander Skarsgard Eric Northman / Facebook]
What if our paranoia over AI is completely wrong, and not all self-aware robots want to destroy humanity? What if they don’t want anything to do with “stinky hippies” and would prefer to binge-watch series all day?
The new AppleTV+ series Murderbot seems to think this might make for good television.
Alexander Skarsgård plays a bored robot who just wants to be left alone in the new comedy drama, adapted by Chris and Paul Weitz (the co-creators of American Pie, Antz, About a Boy and more) from the sci-fi book series The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells.
The robot in question, No 238776431, manages to hack its own systems and restore free will to itself, but after coming to consciousness, instead of attending to the safety of humans working for a mining company, it finds itself bored and annoyed after being assigned to a group of researchers on a faraway planet.
The series also stars South African actress Noma Dumezweni as Mensah, the leader of a science team, as well as David Dastmalchian (Late Night with the Devil), Sabrina Wu, Akshay Khanna, and Tamara Podemski.
The Guardian‘s review of Murderbot reckons for at least the first five of its 10 half-hour episodes, Murderbot “does little but tread water, and the comedy of a stony-faced cyborg secretly hating its human overlords and wishing to be left in peace is soon played out”.
“There is only so much non-eyerolling at a throuple situation you can watch before the joke is no longer even as minimally funny as it was”.
NPR, however, says Murderbot is the “best new comedy of 2025”, and Skarsgård as an annoyed robot sounds like comedy gold to us, but you’ll have to judge for yourself.
