Brothers premieres Wednesday, September 23 on Apple TV.
By Elazar Abrahams
Brothers has all the makings of a celebrity vanity project. Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson play fictionalized versions of themselves, executive produce the series, and turn their real-life friendship into the basis for an eight-episode Apple TV comedy. But it’s so much more than that! The show is genuinely delightful.
The series begins after the wedding of Woody’s daughter falls apart, prompting his family to move onto Matthew’s ranch in Austin. Their already chaotic arrangement becomes even more complicated when Matthew’s mother, “Ma Mac” (Holland Taylor), reveals a decades-old secret: Matthew and Woody might actually be biological brothers.
Although that revelation provides the show with its title and overarching premise, it largely takes a back seat throughout the season. Rather than turning into an extended investigation of their possible shared parentage, Brothers mostly uses the situation as an excuse to throw McConaughey and Harrelson into one ridiculous scenario after another.
That proves to be the right choice. The most important thing about Brothers is that it is very funny. McConaughey and Harrelson have an effortless chemistry developed over decades of friendship, and the series gives them plenty of room to play. Across the season, they dress up as cowboys, rock stars, and various other disguises, seemingly taking every available opportunity to make each other laugh.
The comedy frequently operates on a meta level. Viewers familiar with the actors’ careers and public personas will find plenty of jokes about their movies, celebrity, and respective reputations. Still, the show does not depend entirely on that familiarity. Much of the humor comes from classic sitcom material involving two best friends, their wives, their children, and the increasingly absurd consequences of sharing a home.
The supporting cast helps keep Brothers from becoming solely the Matthew and Woody show. Taylor is particularly hilarious as the fictionalized version of McConaughey’s real-life mother. She delivers some of the season’s biggest laughs and fits perfectly into the strange world the two stars have created around themselves.
What could have been an indulgent inside joke instead becomes one of the most enjoyable new comedies of the year. McConaughey and Harrelson are clearly having an enormous amount of fun, and that energy is infectious. Whether or not they are actually related almost feels beside the point. Brothers makes a convincing case that putting these two together is funny enough on its own.
I give Brothers an A.
