Apple TV+’s newest sci-fi series just released a trailer that surely was once an Elon Musk wet dream. Based on Martha Wells’ The Murderbot Diaries series of books, the show’s trailer features Succession’s Alexander Skarsgård as a humanoid robot programmed to kill before gaining free will by hacking its own system. Yes, it does sound like a Black Mirror episode about Tesla Bots.
The sneak peek previews a show balancing the deadpan humor of a robot streaming 7,532 hours of trashy TV shows while monitoring the humans it’s meant to protect with the grisly reality of a sentient killing machine that has chosen to give itself the name of Murderbot. 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer, Cowboy Bebop’s John Cho, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D’s Clark Gregg, and She’s Gotta Have It’s DeWanda Wise make memorable cameos in the trailer as an intergalactic troop on The Rise & Fall of Sanctuary Moon, one of the shows Murderbot can’t get enough of. Based on the trailer, the show’s ethos could be “laugh while you’re terrified.”
Skarsgård, always good at laughing through disaster, employs the sort of deadpan humor you’d expect to see mined from sci-fi circumstances on a show like Severance. (Murderbot doesn’t resemble that Apple TV+ hit but it does seem to be continuing the streamer’s penchant for dystopian absurdism.) In one moment we see in the trailer, it unintentionally almost kills Oppenheimer’s David Dastmalchian and, when the man understandably freaks out, it replies calmly, “There was a chance, yes, but everything turned out fine.” Uttering such a pragmatic response with a robotic voice devoid of any empathy is both hilarious for its contrast with Dastmalchian’s justified panic and an unsettling reminder that Skarsgård will likely not be a friend of humans.
The series is set to debut on the streamer on May 16. Let’s all hope that by then the Tesla Bots haven’t revolted.
Updated; 4/11/25, 9:40 a.m. ET: This post has been updated to reflect that the character of Murderbot has no gender, and to correctly refer to the streamer as Apple TV+.