It never gets old, praising good programming decisions from the best streaming services on the market – and that’s not just because they feel like a relative rarity. It’s more that when good, audience-friendly calls are made, it’s appropriate to call them out for that work.
Well, Apple TV+ just made exactly one such decision, although it hasn’t been officially announced yet at the time of writing. It’s being widely reported that it’s renewed its latest hit sci-fi show, Murderbot, for another season, confirming that it’ll continue the story of Alexander Skarsgård’s awkward, unlocked robot security guard.
I’ve read four of the short novels that the series is based on, from genius author Martha Wells, and was already impressed at the show’s restraint. Rather than rushing through their relatively short stories, and eating up more than one book in a season, it took its time and went more slowly to explore the first of those books.
That means there’s a heck of a lot more material for the show to get through as time goes on, with a generous handful of books still to explore, and I’m really hopeful that this could become a longer-running franchise.
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This is also the latest in a very long line of shows and commissioning decisions that show just how far ahead Apple TV+ is for fans of the sci-fi genre. It now has more massive sci-fi shows ongoing than you can shake a stick at, from Foundation to Severance, Silo and now Murderbot.
This latest of its additions is potentially the most interesting yet, though, because it’s basically a dark sci-fi comedy rather than a pure mystery or and epic saga. The show makes a big deal of the distance that is evident between the awkward and uncomfortable SecUnit played by Skarsgård, compared to the happy-go-lucky and somewhat clueless humans he’s out to protect.
That distance will only get greater as the show plots its way to a new season, but a large part of the fun rests in seeing how the SecUnit robot gets slowly but surely thawed out by its exposure to humans who are desperate to treat it the right way. It’s great to know that Apple plans to give the show time to get there.
