The new Murderbot TV series on Apple TV is disappointing.  Nothing was changed to appeal to “Modern Audiences”, and after three episodes, it sticks pretty close to the books by Martha Wells.  Murderbot suffers from poor casting and a lack of understanding of the source material.

The Murderbot Diaries are a series of books by Martha Wells.  A security robot is sentient, and no longer has a chip in it’s head to constrain it’s actions.  Robots with no inhibitor chips get scrapped, so the security robot tries to act normal to avoid discovery as it takes freelance security jobs.

Murderbot is a snarky, lazy and doesn’t like humans.  The books are all from Murderbot’s POV, and what the robot is thinking while issues come up on the job.

Science fiction tends to have a male audience.  Some science fiction has elements of romance, personal conflicts and an emotional component to broaden the appeal to the female audience.  Murderbot has none of that.  Martha Wells wrote the books, but they are about as masculine as possible.

For the first three episodes, Murderbot is working with a small crew on an isolated planet.  That introduces Murderbot, and establishes the series premise.  Here’s the crew.

That is not a cast to appeal to men and boys.  The guy in back is supposed to be confrontational, and he does that well.  The black woman is an important character, and matches the books.  The other three women could be anything.  For the TV show, they chose two butch bisexuals, and the crabby woman with long hair.  Attractive and charismatic actors would have helped.

It would not be surprising if the casting director just hired her friends for those parts.  They bring nothing to the show, and they needed to,.

Alexander Skarsgård was cast as Murderbot, and he can handle being a likable smart-arse.

A theme of the series is humans struggling with how to interact with a sentient robot.  Murderbot can think and talk like a human, but is a robot with other capabilities and priorities.  Within 10 minutes of the first episode, Skarsgård retracts his face shield and has a human-like head.  He spends most of the series looking like a human wearing a light armor.

Because Skarsgård looks like a human, he seems more like an autistic person, than a robot.

Murderbot is a wisecracking security robot with a bad attitude.  Men and boys are the natural audience, but the women are intentionally unappealing.  There is no reason why a security robot would have an entire human-like body, but Murderbot does.  The robot doesn’t have the reproductive bits.  We know that, because we are shown.

There is no problem throwing in some beefcake for the ladies.  Women won’t make this show a success, but it doesn’t hurt to give them something to look at.

It’s as if the producers intentionally want to deny men any attractive women to look at.  Showing anything like cleavage is completely out of the question. 

Murderbot is a 6/10, and it’s a shame.