‘Brothers’ Reviews: Critics Love Harrelson and McConaughey, Not the Apple TV Show Around Them

“Photo: Bernie Ilson, Inc., public relations, New York. — Public domain (Wikimedia Commons)”

Critics have reached something close to a single sentence on Brothers, and it is not the one Apple TV would have written for them: Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson are worth watching together, and the sitcom built around them mostly is not. Review after review of the comedy, in which the two friends play heightened versions of themselves who may turn out to be half-brothers, praises the chemistry and files everything else under familiar tropes.

That verdict is fair as far as it goes. What it leaves out is how the show was made. Brothers is a series whose production was stopped over its ending, and the reviews are, for now, a judgment on its beginning.

The split shows in the aggregates. On Rotten Tomatoes the season sits at 57 percent across 35 reviews, and Metacritic lands at 51, squarely in mixed territory. Screen Rant noted that at launch it became the first television series of McConaughey’s career to miss a Fresh rating; True Detective, the HBO drama that made the two men a celebrated screen pairing, holds 78 percent.

The harshest notices are blunt. TVLine, working from the first three episodes, says the show squanders the pair’s “great, goofy chemistry” on lazy jokes and finds “not even a whiff of genuine depth or conflict.” The A.V. Club calls it half-baked, stranded somewhere between a working vacation and a crowd-pleaser, with McConaughey coasting while Harrelson carries more of the comic weight.

The kinder reviews do not really disagree; they weigh the same facts differently. TIME’s Judy Berman finds the series “disjointed but endearing,” strongest when it simply lets the two men be ridiculous together, and singles out Holland Taylor as McConaughey’s hard-drinking mother. Collider, at six out of ten, calls the leads “a joy to watch together” and Taylor one of the show’s “secret weapons,” while conceding that the supporting characters are thin and the tropes are classic sitcom stock. Across the field, the double-family material surrounding the leads reads as generic, and a subplot about elderly gangsters, in Berman’s words, feels like excerpts from a different show.

That is the standing risk of the form. The comedy in which a star plays himself, from Curb Your Enthusiasm to Extras, works only when the star agrees to be less flattering than the brand. Brothers had the material for it: a premise billed as a true rumor about the two men, and a run for governor of Texas by McConaughey’s character that echoes the real race he weighed and chose not to enter. TIME reads the campaign as a sharp contrast between the two personalities; TVLine sees one more aimless thread. The disagreement matters, because it is the one place the show borrows from its star’s biography rather than his persona.

Here is what most reviews skip. Filming in Austin halted with eight of ten episodes shot after co-creator and original showrunner David West Read, a Schitt’s Creek veteran, left over creative disagreements about how the season should end. Lee Eisenberg, co-creator of Jury Duty, stepped in to supervise the remaining episodes and the reshoots, and Paramount Television Studios later took over production. The season now reaching viewers runs eight episodes on its current listings, not the ten first reported.

That makes the consensus provisional in a precise way. Critics have judged the setup: two families and a paternity question dropped into the middle of a friendship. TIME itself observes that the half-brothers idea works better as a showcase for its stars than as a plot engine. But the answer to that question, the thing a showrunner walked away over, is the part that changed hands mid-production, and it is the part released last. Whether the reveal plays as comedy, as sentiment or as a dodge is the real hit-or-miss test for a show about two men who built a public friendship on a joke, and it has not been taken yet.

Brothers premiered on Apple TV on September 23 with its first two episodes, with the rest arriving weekly through a finale on November 4. Created by McConaughey, Harrelson, Read and Eisenberg, with Natalie Martinez and Brittany Ishibashi as the two wives, it has so far found viewers warmer than critics: the Rotten Tomatoes audience score stands at 74 percent, on fewer than 50 ratings.

If the ending lands, this week’s reviews will read as a verdict on a first act. If it does not, Brothers will close the way its production did, with nobody quite agreeing on how the story should end.