Unlike its stars, Brothers is only half-baked

Playing relatively straight man to the nomadic vegan bestie living out of the psychedelic bus in his driveway, McConaughey gets less color to play here. That’s in keeping with the poet-philosopher guise he’s donned since TV audiences first fell under the sway of Rust Cohle and his Big Hug Mug (a prop that’s too prominently displayed throughout Brothers to count as an Easter egg). But McConaughey’s corner of Brothers is more muted as a result, creating added strain for the campaign storyline, which, despite its Texas-size scale, lacks the more captivating personal stakes of what’s happening among the Harrelsons. McConaughey gets to cut loose in a few episodes with the Woodman, but of the two of them, he’s the one whose commitment to playing “himself” comes across as coasting.

Brothers lives in a hazy no-man’s land between “working vacation for movie stars” and “bingeable crowd-pleaser.” This is no slapdash production. The visuals capitalize on the natural splendor of the show’s Texas Hill Country setting; showrunner Lee Eisenberg hired plenty of names that will ring a bell for anyone who kept up with the vintage of network sitcom that Brothers most closely resembles. Between directors Trent O’Donnell, Erin O’Malley, and Jason Winer and writers Brett Baer, Dave Finkel, Alex Cuthbertson, and Matt Fusfeld, it feels like Eisenberg called his way down a New Girl alumni phone tree. (KPop Demon Hunters screenwriters Danya Jimenez and Hannah McMechan are aboard here too—for the most music-heavy episodes, naturally.) Every once in awhile, the experience in that writer’s room comes through loud and clear, as when Harrelson exchanges rat-a-tat with two old-timers trying to collect on a debt owed to them by his dad, or in a visual gag that reveals McConaughey’s incredibly involved grooming routines. Unfortunately, such material was placed in some run-of-the-mill scripts, with stock plots like Harrelson and McConaughey forgetting Valentine’s Day and paying a steep price for it.

Despite recalling comedies of days gone by, Brothers winds up feeling extremely contemporary—in mostly unflattering ways. It’s queue-filler of the highest order—TV-like product with megastar wattage. The half-hour episodes go down as easy as the craft brews McConaughey holds so conspicuously label-to-camera, but they lead to neither drunken comedic euphoria or regrettable “I can’t believe I watched the whole thing” hangover. There are some earnest attempts at fleshing out various family members and relationships—Harrelson and Kuan strike up a real tender dynamic while the scuttlebutt about Olive’s granddad and Ma Mac provides welcome distraction from her romantic woes. But there’s little sense of whether all that’s being developed there might continue to develop, or be worth developing, past this single season.

It’s not always funny, but Brothers is never not a curious artifact of an uneasy period in TV history, when one show can contain abundant f-bombs, some of the biggest bong rips ever put on television, and an adorable moppet putting her confidence to the test as she follows in her father’s footsteps and goes out for the school play. Yet as momentous as such events may be, there’s little sense of any of it impacting the characters in meaningful, long-lasting ways. To paraphrase the tagline for a movie whose iconography Brothers raids without shame or real thought (nobody raised an eyebrow at the sixth-episode school-dance invitation conducted in Wooderson cosplay?): We’re watching a time the fake Harrelsons and fake McConaugheys will never forget. If only we could remember anything about the show two or three months from now.

Erik Adams is The A.V. Club’s senior TV editor.