The first thing “Brothers” puts on screen is a disclaimer, “Based on a true rumor,” and the opening minutes then find Woody Harrelson trying to escape his own household in California while his daughter Olive (Highdee Kuan) cries over an engagement that has just fallen apart. Apple TV’s comedy, in which Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey play fictionalized versions of themselves, premiered Wednesday, September 23rd, with its first two episodes, “On the Road” and “The Hunt,” and the remaining six arrive weekly through November 4th. Two episodes in, the friendship is the whole show, and the rumor in that disclaimer is mostly an excuse to put these two men under one roof and see what breaks.
The stars share the “created by” credit with David West Read, the “Schitt’s Creek” writer who left during production, and Lee Eisenberg, who took over as showrunner. Trent O’Donnell directed the pilot. That handoff is the craft story under this premiere, because a show built on two famous personas lives or dies on tone, and several critics who saw more of the season say the tone never settles. This review is written from more than a dozen published reviews and episode recaps, with every plot beat checked against at least two of them, not from a screener. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Brothers” season one, episodes one and two.
Two episodes in, the friendship is the whole show, and the rumor in that disclaimer is mostly an excuse to put these two men under one roof and see what breaks.”
Matthew’s problem, when the Harrelsons roll up to his ranch outside Austin in their solar-powered bus, is a speech. His late father’s old high school is retiring his football number, Matthew has been asked to speak at the ceremony, and he cannot find the words. Joy (Brittany Ishibashi) refused to let her husband run off to Texas alone, which is why the whole family came along. Woody promises the visit will not get in the way of the writing. He interrupts, keeps interrupting, and finally talks Matthew into going out for a drink.
The night out is the liveliest stretch of the pilot, at least on paper. Woody books an Uber Pool, the two of them end up squeezed in with a carload of rowdy young football fans, and Woody objects to the air conditioning on environmental grounds until the pair get thrown out of the ride. Their rescue is a TMZ photographer, and somewhere on that drive Matthew finally finishes the speech, at which point Woody redirects them to a rodeo. Matthew, chasing a childhood dream, gets on a bull and does not last long on it. He had handed Woody his phone, with the finished speech on it, before he climbed on, and the bull destroys it. The fight that follows is real enough that the two men go home separately.
The secret arrives while Matthew is at the ceremony. Woody, back at the ranch and ready to load his family onto the bus and leave, ends up alone with Ma Mac (Holland Taylor), who has been drinking, and she tells him she knew his father, Clive, in a way that leaves very little to the imagination. The show has renamed the real Charles Harrelson, which gives the writers room to invent. Matthew, meanwhile, delivers the tribute off the cuff without the speech the bull ate, then stops the Harrelsons’ bus on its way out. He apologizes, then announces that he is running for governor of Texas and wants Woody’s family to stay and help. Woody says yes, and he keeps Ma Mac’s story to himself.
Ma Mac, asked about it again in “The Hunt,” blames the whole thing on alcohol and old age, which is exactly what someone with a secret would say. The episode’s main event is Wyatt (Nolan Almeida) turning 16, and Matthew’s gift is a hunting rifle, because a father-son deer hunt at that age is a McConaughey family tradition. Olive and her sister Kai (Oona Yaffe) tag along. Woody has raised his daughters to believe they would never kill an animal, so he charges into the woods and plants himself between Wyatt’s rifle and the deer. The two men argue all the way home in the car, until Woody hits a deer and kills it. The family ends up holding a funeral, with Woody delivering the eulogy.
That joke is built out of the two personas, the vegan anarchist and the Texas rancher, and it gets a payoff warmer than the setup, because Wyatt never wanted to shoot anything and went along only to please his father. Woody also gets a quiet heart-to-heart with Olive. The campaign starts here too, as Matthew and Valentina (Natalie Martinez) interview Gwen (Lisa Gilroy), a campaign manager who ends up interviewing them instead. Her bluntest verdict is that celebrity has turned his brain into “a big old sloppy pile of goo.” She tells Matthew that any skeletons need to come out now, and he insists there are none, a line that lands differently when the audience knows what Woody knows.
Then “Brothers” turns into a different show. Woody has been asking questions about Clive at the Saddle Saloon, and after he leaves, the bartender makes a phone call. When Woody is called back, he is knocked out and wakes up tied to a chair with a phone book strapped to him, facing the Travis brothers (Jeff Kober and Barry Corbin), two old men who say his father borrowed $1,800 from them and skipped town. With decades of interest, they now want six figures from his son. If he will not pay, they plan to shoot him through the phone book. A gun does go off, and the book stops the bullet. Ma Mac arrives with a shotgun, gets Woody out, warns him that he has kicked a hornet’s nest, and leaves on a motorcycle.
That turn is where the critics push back hardest. TIME’s Judy Berman, who called the series “disjointed but breezy,” wrote that the subplot with Kober and Corbin “feels like excerpts from a different show,” and TVLine’s Dave Nemetz called it “a bizarre crime element that doesn’t fit at all.” That verdict may be too quick. The Travis brothers are the first thing in “Brothers” that attaches real stakes to the rumor, and they turn Ma Mac into a woman who plainly knows more about Clive than she will say. Taylor is also the performance most critics single out, and Collider’s Victoria Luxford called her “one of the show’s secret weapons.”
The broader reception is mixed. The Rotten Tomatoes critics’ score sat in the mid-50s the day after the premiere, and Metacritic had the season at 51. Variety’s Alison Herman wrote that the chemistry “still isn’t enough to make ‘Brothers’ feel like a real show instead of an overlong comedy sketch,” while The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg summed it up as “Good for a couple of chuckles, little more.” At the other end, CBR gave it an 8 out of 10, and Screen Rant gave it a 3. Fienberg compared it to the pair vamping on stage at this year’s Emmys, since the series asks them to do the same for eight episodes “in order to salvage a TV show with no particular direction.”
Our read is that this premiere is built for the audience that already likes these two, and that is probably enough to keep a lot of people watching. The paternity mystery is the part that will make or break the season, because Woody is now sitting on exactly the kind of secret Gwen just told Matthew to put on the table. If the show lets that mystery drift, Collider’s verdict, that “the show is alright, alright, alright,” is likely the ceiling.
What Do You Think? Should Woody tell Matthew what Ma Mac said before the campaign gets any bigger? Did the Travis brothers’ kidnapping feel like a welcome jolt or like a scene from another show? And after two episodes, are you staying with “Brothers” weekly, or waiting to binge the whole season in November?
See you on the next binge!
