Brothers Season 1 Review

The first two episodes of Brothers debut on Apple TV on September 23.

Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson are great actors, and the last time they made a series together — the first season of True Detective — it was a triumph. It sure is nice to know that they’re such good friends in real life (friends are great!), but Apple TV’s attempt to capitalize on all of this history via their on-screen reunion in Brothers is a misguided endeavor.

In the new series, McConaughey and Harrelson play themselves, kicking off with Woody and his family going to visit Matthew and his family in Texas. The big hook here — based on something the actors have in fact theorized as a possibility in real life — is that in this fictionalized version of these two celebrities’ lives, Woody discovers he and Matthew might be biological half-brothers thanks to an offhand comment from Matthew’s mom (Holland Taylor).

If you were to lean into the weirdness, you could no doubt deliver something genuinely funny and clever with this basic setup, and we’ve certainly seen some great films and series in which celebrities portray skewed versions of themselves. But Brothers feels notably paper thin in terms of its approach, and doesn’t even fully embrace its premise by examining how this friendship might change thanks to this news. Instead, Woody keeps the potential brother revelation a secret from Matthew, relegating his attempts to find out the truth to a background subplot for the majority of the episodes. The actual bigger ongoing storyline is Matthew deciding to run for Governor of Texas and asking Woody to stick around and help with his campaign, which is never that compelling.

McConaughey and Harrelson co-created Brothers along with two accomplished writers, David West Read (& Juliet, Schitt's Creek) and Lee Eisenberg (The Office, Jury Duty), with Eisenberg serving as showrunner. Yet from the start, even with the talent involved, it feels like a struggle to sustain the show for even these eight episodes, resulting in some odd shifts along the way and a tangible feeling that those making Brothers were never sure exactly what kind of show this should be.

As far as depicting these guys as an onscreen comedy duo, initially McConaughey is very much given the straight man role, with Woody as his wacky buddy who keeps getting them into trouble, much to Matthew’s chagrin. While the fact that these two guys are famous isn’t ignored, it’s not front and center to them as characters in this series. But then, halfway through the season, there’s a tangible shift where they’re both now depicted as equally clueless celebrities, blind to how the non-acting achievements they like to boast about mainly happened because they were already so well known.

There is some simple charm in seeing these two bounce off one another in Brothers’ early episodes, but even that begins to dissipate as time goes on and things get sillier, including plotlines like Matthew and Woody dressing in wacky disguises to perform at a local coffeehouse to prove people will like their (bad) music regardless, or something as notably tired and sitcom-hacky as a “Matthew and Woody both forgot to get their wives Valentine’s Day gifts” episode.

Details

As you might expect, Matthew and Woody definitely know how to play Matthew and Woody well, and of course they have good chemistry together, but it’s rarely being used in an interesting manner. However, as much as it feels strange to portray Matthew McConaughey as relatively straitlaced at all — this is a guy who was once arrested after getting high and playing the bongos naked in the middle of the night after all — the early episodes do give him the strongest acting spotlight of the series, as he does good work playing fictional Matthew’s introspection regarding his late father.

But that brings up a strange feeling that also hangs over this series, which provides Matthew and Woody with fictionalized wives (Natalie Martinez and Brittany Ishibashi play Valentina McConaughey and Joy Harrelson respectively), children (played by a group that includes Oona Yaffe, Highdee Kuan, Nolan Almeida, Ella Grace Helton, and Noah Carganilla), and parents (Holland). Again, this kind of thing has been done before, often successfully; Curb Your Enthusiasm did it for years! But it feels off in Brothers because the show doesn’t have a strong point of view. While there are some laughs, it’s never consistently funny, leaving too much time to ponder real life vs. what’s onscreen. For example, frequent mentions of Woody’s dad — vaguely described in the Brothersverse as a deadbeat jailbird — open a can of worms to the dark and violent crimes committed by the actual Charles Harrelson, which is a whole other thing entirely.

Was there a more fearless and subversively funny way to tackle or deflect from this and other messier aspects of these guys’ lives within the show? Absolutely, but Brothers always goes for the safest and tamest route, and it’s only occasionally entertaining enough to make up for that.