Apple TV+ announced today—one day ahead of the show’s first-season finale—that it’s renewing its sci-fi/comedy adaptation of Martha Wells’ Murderbot books for a second season. Starring Alexander Skarsgård, and written and directed by sibling duo Paul and Chris Weitz, the series adapts Wells’ award-winning novels about a semi-organic “SecUnit” living in a grim, capitalist future, trying to keep its “stupid fucking humans” alive while spending as much time as inhumanly possible watching TV.
As the regular reviewer of Murderbot here at The A.V. Club, your humble Newswire writer would like to note that this is pretty good news, for a couple of reasons. For one, the show—despite some genuinely irritating weirdness with its tone—features a handful of really great performances, notably from Skarsgård, Noma Dumezweni, and David Dastmalchian. (The latter as the paranoid researcher who is—correctly—convinced that there’s something off about the killer robot with the guns in its arms, and a surprising capacity for free will.) But also: The first season confined itself, somewhat strangely, to Wells’ quite short initial novella, All Systems Red; a follow-up season will hopefully allow the show to get more expansive, while also introducing one of the books’ best characters, a smartass sentient ship nicknamed ART that can match Skarsgård’s Murderbot snark-for-snark.
It’s been hard, up to now, to know where Murderbot was at, in terms of its network approval. Reviews have generally been good, but the series never managed to make its way onto any of third-party charts that try to decipher out how well streaming shows are actually doing in terms of viewership. (Even in the usual effusive renewal notice, Apple doesn’t bring up viewership at all—and streamers love bringing up any records or milestones they can tout to make a show seem successful.) Still, it’s good news for those who enjoyed the show’s first season, and are excited to find out what’s next for Skarsgård’s deeply sarcastic armed security specialist/consumer of “premium quality content.”
