{"id":779838,"date":"2026-09-23T09:48:09","date_gmt":"2026-09-23T09:48:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/779838\/"},"modified":"2026-09-23T09:48:09","modified_gmt":"2026-09-23T09:48:09","slug":"brothers-review-mcconaughey-and-harrelson-show-is-half-baked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/779838\/","title":{"rendered":"Brothers review: McConaughey and Harrelson show is half-baked"},"content":{"rendered":"

If streaming-TV originals have a final form, it may be this: Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey playing fictionalized versions of themselves in what has to be the most expensive version of a 2010s ABC family sitcom ever made. An amusing-enough method of keeping Apple TV subscribers around between seasons of Ted Lasso<\/a> and Stick<\/a>, Brothers re-teams the-real life buds and True Detective<\/a> stars in an alternately wholesome and profane Apple TV series that\u2019s built around a tabloid anecdote and drafts off public personae the headlining talent previously plied in service of AI enterprise software<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Brothers\u2019 laidback approach to telling the story of the Harrelson clan crashing at the McConaughey family ranch is held together by valiant efforts by some of the producers, writers, and directors behind the American Office<\/a>, Modern Family<\/a>, and New Girl<\/a>. And yet when the sporadic laughter subsides, it\u2019s hard not to see this celebrity-driven trifle as an indicator of the current state of TV that\u2019s more accurate than any of the many awards Apple picked up<\/a> during the night when the (possibly biological?) brothers of Brothers tried to get a rushed Emmys ceremony to the end of its timeslot through the sheer force of their combined charisma. And that\u2019s all before self-anointed new king of Hollywood<\/a> David Ellison\u2019s name shows up in the credits.<\/p>\n

Brothers is\u2014per a title card that gets less cute and necessary (because who jumps into a streaming show midseason?) by the episode\u2014 \u201cbased on a true rumor\u201d of a sexual encounter between Harrelson\u2019s ne\u2019er-do-well father and McConaughey\u2019s mother (played here with plenty of southern-fried pluck by Holland Taylor). But the mystery of the Oscar winner\u2019s paternity is mere logline window dressing for a show that\u2019s more about the colliding worlds of two families and how those collisions prove that the bond of co-starring in Surfer, Dude<\/a> is thicker than blood. It\u2019s also, to varying degrees, a show about eldest Harrelson daughter Olive (Highdee Kuan) getting over a called-off engagement, her dad paying for the sins of his old man, and McConaughey making good on his idle thoughts of running for political office. The third of those plot lines is the most forced and farthest fetched, but it at least makes room for Lisa Gilroy to sprinkle a little Comedy Bang! Bang!<\/a> weirdness into the proceedings as a high-strung campaign manager who upbraids Harrison and McConaughey in terms that, fortunately for Brothers, only kinda sorta encapsulate the show: \u201can endless barrage of egomaniacal and borderline sociopathic behavior from both of you.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is no vanity project. The leads allow themselves to look plenty foolish\u2014particularly Harrelson, whose just slightly exaggerated personal beliefs and hippie-dippy flakiness make him a thorn in everyone on the ranch\u2019s side. This also gives him a chance to tap into the comedic spirit of the last TV character he played who shared his first name; the golden retriever Woody Boyd energy that so frequently bolsters his performance here is a nice reminder that before Harrelson played hard-asses, deadbeats, and loose cannons on the big screen, he was one of the funniest supporting sitcom players of the \u201980s. If nothing else Brothers is a fresh display of those particular talents.<\/p>\n

Playing relatively straight man to the nomadic vegan bestie living out of the psychedelic bus in his driveway, McConaughey gets less color to play here. That\u2019s in keeping with the poet-philosopher guise he\u2019s donned since TV audiences first fell under the sway of Rust Cohle and his Big Hug Mug (a prop that\u2019s too prominently displayed throughout Brothers to count as an Easter egg). But McConaughey\u2019s corner of Brothers is more muted as a result, creating added strain for the campaign storyline, which, despite its Texas-size scale, lacks the more captivating personal stakes of what\u2019s happening among the Harrelsons. McConaughey gets to cut loose in a few episodes with the Woodman, but of the two of them, he\u2019s the one whose commitment to playing \u201chimself\u201d comes across as coasting.<\/p>\n

Brothers lives in a hazy no-man\u2019s land between \u201cworking vacation for movie stars\u201d and \u201cbingeable crowd-pleaser.\u201d This is no slapdash production. The visuals capitalize on the natural splendor of the show\u2019s Texas Hill Country setting; showrunner Lee Eisenberg hired plenty of names that will ring a bell for anyone who kept up with the vintage of network sitcom that Brothers most closely resembles. Between directors Trent O\u2019Donnell, Erin O\u2019Malley, and Jason Winer and writers Brett Baer, Dave Finkel, Alex Cuthbertson, and Matt Fusfeld, it feels like Eisenberg called his way down a New Girl alumni phone tree. (KPop Demon Hunters<\/a> screenwriters Danya Jimenez and Hannah McMechan are aboard here too\u2014for the most music-heavy episodes, naturally.) Every once in awhile, the experience in that writer\u2019s room comes through loud and clear, as when Harrelson exchanges rat-a-tat with two old-timers trying to collect on a debt owed to them by his dad, or in a visual gag that reveals McConaughey\u2019s incredibly involved grooming routines. Unfortunately, such material was placed in some run-of-the-mill scripts, with stock plots like Harrelson and McConaughey forgetting Valentine\u2019s Day and paying a steep price for it.<\/p>\n

Despite recalling comedies of days gone by, Brothers winds up feeling extremely contemporary\u2014in mostly unflattering ways. It\u2019s queue-filler of the highest order\u2014TV-like product with megastar wattage. The half-hour episodes go down as easy as the craft brews McConaughey holds so conspicuously label-to-camera, but they lead to neither drunken comedic euphoria or regrettable \u201cI can\u2019t believe I watched the whole thing\u201d hangover. There are some earnest attempts at fleshing out various family members and relationships\u2014Harrelson and Kuan strike up a real tender dynamic while the scuttlebutt about Olive\u2019s granddad and Ma Mac provides welcome distraction from her romantic woes. But there\u2019s little sense of whether all that\u2019s being developed there might continue to develop, or be worth developing, past this single season.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not always funny, but Brothers is never not a curious artifact of an uneasy period in TV history, when one show can contain abundant f-bombs, some of the biggest bong rips ever put on television, and an adorable moppet putting her confidence to the test as she follows in her father\u2019s footsteps and goes out for the school play. Yet as momentous as such events may be, there\u2019s little sense of any of it impacting the characters in meaningful, long-lasting ways. To paraphrase the tagline<\/a> for a movie whose iconography Brothers raids without shame or real thought (nobody raised an eyebrow at the sixth-episode school-dance invitation conducted in Wooderson<\/a> cosplay?): We\u2019re watching a time the fake Harrelsons and fake McConaugheys will never forget. If only we could remember anything about the show two or three months from now.<\/p>\n

Erik Adams is\u00a0The A.V. Club\u2019s\u00a0senior TV editor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If streaming-TV originals have a final form, it may be this: Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey playing fictionalized…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":779839,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[96,391,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-779838","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-tv","tag-entertainment","tag-tv","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779838","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=779838"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/779838\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/779839"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=779838"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=779838"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=779838"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}