Alexander Skarsgård Stars In AI Sci-Fi Comedy Series Murderbot
AI is unquestionably all the rage these days and not just in real life, with Hollywood producing plenty of movies and shows about its various impacts on our world, both good and bad. Apple TV+ has released their own take on the genre with the new show Murderbot, based on the book series The Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells.
It stars Big Little Lies and Succession star Alexander Skarsgård as a robot that gains free will, and breaks free from its protocols, having to keep itself hidden from detection so it isn’t shut down. Here’s all we know…
What is Murderbot about?
Despite its name (and basic premise), Murderbot is a comedy as well as sci-fi, set some time in the not-too-distant future. Pulling from the successful novel series, the show centres around a “security cyborg” (Skarsgård) that works for a powerful mega-corporation, and the cyborg is named by itself as “Murderbot”. Murderbot, known as a “SecUnit” by everyone else, manages to suddenly gain free will, allowing it to think and act autonomously. It finds that it is horrified by human emotion, though, and decides it wants to find its own place in the universe. With that in mind, the cyborg is well aware that if its ability to think freely is discovered, it’ll surely face serious problems and the threat of being reset or destroyed, and so keeps the fact concealed, even when it’s forced to carry out a dangerous assignment.
Underneath the sleek exterior, Murderbot is much less interested in humans (who it deems as “idiots”) and more consumed by its internal thoughts and watching thousands of hours of TV, particularly its favourite show, “The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon”, a campy space soap opera (which is depicted in snippets in the show). The trailer shows Murderbot to be self-conscious and preferring to be left alone, even if it does have some interest in the people it serves, jumping in at one point to save a group of humans from an alien. But Murderbot becomes worried that his secret may be uncovered, and will do whatever it can to avoid being caught.
Who else stars, and is there a release date?
Murderbot features a few other recognisable faces in the cast alongside Skarsgård, such as David Dastmalchian (Oppenheimer), Noma Dumezweni (Only Murders In The Building), Sabrina Wu (Joyride), Clark Gregg (The Avengers) and John Cho (The Sympathiser). The series is available to watch on Apple TV+.
