Yesterday, Vanity Fair ran a big, splashy, photo-filled first look at Murderbot, the upcoming Apple TV+ series based on Martha Wells’ Murderbot Diaries. Essentially, it’s an introduction to the show for everyone who hasn’t already become very attached to the rogue SecUnit, with its begrudging tolerance of humans and preference for spending a lot of time watching its entertainment feed. Around these parts, we are very familiar, and very excited (if also slightly trepidatious; Alexander Skarsgård is not really what we imagined when we thought of Murderbot. For me, it looks like Frankie Adams. Your imagination may vary).
But about that in-story entertainment: Murderbot’s favorite show is The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon, an epically long series Wells has said is “kind of based on How to Get Away with Murder, but in space, on a colony, with all different characters and hundreds more episodes, basically.”
And we’re going to get to watch Sanctuary Moon. Like maybe quite a bit of it. The Vanity Fair piece says, after pointing out that Murderbot “has been praised as a metaphor for people on the autism spectrum”:
Murderbot studies the fictional melodrama for cues about how to behave in emotional situations. The show-within-a-show stars John Cho, Jack McBrayer, Clark Gregg, and DeWanda Wise, sporting outrageous hairstyles and costumes that make the stylings of A Flock of Seagulls look like business casual.
Though Sanctuary Moon is unabashedly garish, Murderbot gets something valuable from it nonetheless. “For all of us, there are these comforting ways of shutting down the chatter in our head that don’t have to be incredibly high-minded,” Chris Weitz says.
You don’t put performers like that in your doubly fictional show-within-a-show—your “unabashedly garish” show—unless you plan to make good use of them, right? Right, series creators Chris and Paul Weitz??
Murderbot has other things going for it, like its full cast, which includes Noma Dumezweni and David Dastmalchian. But somehow the fact that not only Murderbot but also Sanctuary Moon is going to be a real thing, a thing we can watch on our TVs and laptops—this is a source of no small amount of joy this week.
Murderbot arrives on Apple TV+ on May 16th, which, I feel compelled to point out, is somehow next month.
