Yesterday the entire visual record of “Brothers” was one photograph. Today there are eighty eight seconds of it, and they answer the question Woody Harrelson planted at the Sarajevo Film Festival last week when he warned people off expecting another “True Detective.” Apple TV dropped the first full trailer on its own channel, and the short version is that Harrelson was telling the truth. There is not one frame in here that belongs to a prestige crime drama. What there is instead is a psychedelic tour bus, a Texas ranch under siege, a mother in red sunglasses dropping a bomb on a patio, and a closing joke that only works because of something real that happened at the Oscars in 2014.
The series lands on 23 September with two episodes, then runs weekly through 4 November, eight in total. Lee Eisenberg showruns it, Paramount Television Studios produces, and McConaughey and Harrelson both star and executive produce while playing fictionalized versions of themselves. The premise is that Harrelson moves his family onto McConaughey’s Texas ranch after his daughter’s wedding collapses, and the two of them stumble into a family secret while they are stuck together. We pulled the trailer down and went through it frame by frame rather than reading anybody else’s write up, so everything below is what is actually on screen. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the “Brothers” trailer and the family secret it puts on screen.
There is not one frame in here that belongs to a prestige crime drama.”
It opens in a bathroom on the ranch, warm wood and low light, McConaughey at the mirror with one of the kids while he clears his throat and works himself up to something. Then it cuts hard to Harrelson outdoors with both hands pressed flat against his temples, eyes shut, groaning like a man passing a kidney stone. Back to the mirror, where McConaughey rolls his shoulders and announces “Bingo, bango, bongo” to nobody, and a little bell dings on the cut. Eight seconds in and the register is already set: two men who have known each other for forty years, doing bits at each other across a house neither of them can escape.
The first proper scene is a car, and it is the best joke in the opening half. A young guy in a red bandana is riding beside McConaughey and cannot quite believe his luck. “Are you really Matthew McConaughey?” Yes, I am. “Would you sleep with my girlfriend?” No, I will not. There is a beat, a small disappointed “oh,” and then the follow up that makes it: “Can I tell people that you did?” No, you cannot. It is delivered completely deadpan on both sides, and it tells you the show knows exactly what its lead’s public image is worth and intends to spend all of it.
Then Harrelson arrives, and he does not arrive quietly. A tour bus painted end to end with rainbows and mountains rolls up the ranch driveway, and he steps off it in a cowboy hat calling out “Greetings, McConaugheys!” like a man who has been invited. Cut to the house: “Is that Woody?” and then “What the hell are you doing here?” His answer is that he “just needed time to decompress,” and when McConaughey asks decompress from what, Harrelson simply starts crying. Watching all of this from a patio chair, in enormous red sunglasses and animal print, is Ma Mac (Holland Taylor), who is going to matter a great deal in about thirty seconds.
The middle stretch is the household coming apart, and the trailer edits it as a rolling series of small disasters. Three women sit on a couch staring at something off screen with real alarm. Harrelson lies shirtless and beaming on a deck. He turns up in front of a wall of vinyl, mid sentence. Somewhere in there McConaughey lands the line that most cleanly explains the marriage of these two men: “How is it that someone who lives with three women knows so little about women?” Harrelson does not even pause. “Honestly, you can be very confounding as a gender.” That exchange is the whole show in eleven words, and it is much closer to two friends needling each other on a podcast than to anything scripted in the traditional sense.
Then the trailer turns, and it turns using title cards. Their names come up first, MATTHEW McCONAUGHEY and WOODY HARRELSON, and then across the back half of the cut the cards start finishing a sentence instead: ARE FRIENDS, and a beat later, AND FAMILY? Sitting between those two cards is the scene the entire series hangs on. Ma Mac, hand at her chin, tells Harrelson that “maybe it’s not a total coinky dink that you and Matthew are always scrappin’ like brothers.” He starts to say “Ma Mac, are you sayin’…” and cannot finish it. Somebody else does: “You and Matthew might be brothers?” Her answer is one word, and it is yes.
What follows is roughly twenty seconds of pure escalation with almost no dialogue holding it together, which is the standard shape of a comedy trailer’s third act and is executed here at speed. Harrelson starts “buckle up, chuckle” and gets cut off by somebody roaring “I will end you, man!” There is a scuffle in a shed with a grey bearded man in plaid. There is a confrontation in a bar under a US flag, and another one under a neon sign at night. There is a rodeo in the dark, a woman in a red blazer looking like the evening has gone badly wrong, and a high school gym decked in balloons with McConaughey holding a microphone on a stage. Harrelson is at the wheel of that painted bus at one point, wide eyed, gripping it with both hands while somebody stands in the middle of a dirt road ahead of him. Over the top of all of it Harrelson asks, genuinely, “Am I being trafficked?”
And then the title card, which is the smartest thing in the trailer and the reason this show was greenlit. It starts as a single vintage yearbook portrait, except the face is wrong: the left half is a teenage Harrelson in a patterned seventies shirt, the right half is a teenage McConaughey in a white collar and a puka shell necklace, and the two halves are fused down the middle into one boy. Then it splits apart into the two separate photographs, side by side, and the word BROTHERS lands across both of them. They were taken years and hundreds of miles apart, and at that size the resemblance is genuinely uncomfortable. No line of dialogue is doing any work there. The show simply puts the evidence on screen and lets you look at it, which is a confidence you can only have when the joke is true.
The last beat is saved for after the title, and it is at Harrelson’s expense. Somebody introduces McConaughey as an “Oscar winner.” Harrelson starts to say “Oscar” about himself and McConaughey cuts straight across him: “What do you call that when you don’t…” and lets it hang there until Harrelson has to supply the word himself. “Nominee.” McConaughey repeats it back to him, satisfied. That gag is not invented for television. McConaughey won Best Actor for “Dallas Buyers Club” in 2014. Harrelson has been nominated three times, for “The People vs. Larry Flynt,” “The Messenger” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” and has never won one. The show is mining a real and slightly sore thing between two real friends, and doing it to their faces.
So Harrelson’s Sarajevo warning holds up, and it holds up more completely than we expected when we wrote about it. This is fictionalized selves, improvised sounding cruelty between people who love each other, and family chaos in a house nobody can leave. That is the ‘Curb’ lineage, not the “True Detective” one, and anybody arriving for Rust and Marty is going to bounce off it hard in the first ninety seconds. The open question the trailer deliberately will not answer is whether eight episodes of two movie stars playing themselves can hold, because the version of this that fails is the one where the bits are funnier than the story underneath them. What it has going for it is the thing you cannot fake and cannot cast: these two have been doing this to each other since 1996, and the camera has never once made it look like work.
What Do You Think? Does the yearbook photo gag land for you as the genuinely uncanny thing the show thinks it is, or does the whole half brother premise feel like a bit stretched to eight episodes? Are you more interested in the McConaughey and Harrelson double act or in whether Ma Mac is actually telling the truth about any of it? And after seeing real footage, does this look like something you will watch weekly from 23 September, or the kind of show you let pile up and burn through in one sitting?
See you on the next binge!
