It’s so close to Murderbot o’clock, folks. The Apple TV+ adaptation of Martha Wells’ book series arrives next month, and we’ve finally got a trailer—a charming trailer that even lets us see The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon!
(Setting it to a song indisputably associated with a certain scene from Reservoir Dogs is sure a choice, but okay, we’ll just let that slide.)
Murderbot stars Alexander Skarsgård as a rogue Security Unit, or SecUnit, who has hacked itself. It’s not just a mindless killing machine; it has things it likes and things it dislikes. First column: entertainment programming. Second column: humans, which make no sense to it. But its job is to look out for them, and they might just grow on it. A little.
Here’s Apple’s synopsis:
Based on Martha Wells’ bestselling Hugo and Nebula Award-winning book series The Murderbot Diaries, Murderbot is a sci-fi thriller/comedy about a self-hacking security construct who is horrified by human emotion yet drawn to its vulnerable clients. Played by Skarsgård, Murderbot must hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really wants is to be left alone to watch futuristic soap operas and figure out its place in the universe.
It’s a thriller and a comedy! This is not untrue. Murderbot comes from creators Chris and Paul Weitz, and also stars Noma Dumezweni, David Dastmalchian, Sabrina Wu, Akshay Khanna, Tattiawna Jones, and Tamara Podemski. It also stars, in the show-within-a-show Sanctuary Moon, John Cho, Jack McBrayer, Clark Gregg, and DeWanda Wise, and they look amazing.
Murderbot has a two-episode premiere on May 16th; the remaining eight episodes of the first season will air weekly on Apple TV+.
