If there's one thing I love on TV, it's when actors turn up and play themselves. Especially when they're not afraid to take the piss out of their own celebrity image. (Think: James Marsden going all obnoxious-Hollywood-actor type in Jury Duty, or Liam Neeson dialling it up to full self-serious self-parody in Life's Too Short. And yeah, pretty much all of Extras.) And now comes a show for the real meta-heads: Apple TV's Brothers, in which Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson portray ridiculous, gleefully over-the-top versions of themselves, blending reality with the silliest sitcom archetypes for an eight-episode series that adds up to a great, surprisingly wholesome hangout.
The premise of the show, as we're told by the show's title card, is "based on a true rumour." Basically, a story went around some time ago that the two actors - who famously collabed on the first season of True Detective, and have been IRL besties since they met in the '90s - could actually be related. (They've yet to confirm either way.) And so in the first episode McConaughey's half-cut mother ("Ma Mac," played with a fierce, funny waspishness by Holland Taylor) hints to Harrelson that she might've "known" his dad, in the biblical sense. This sets in motion an increasingly zany chain of events wherein Harrelson secretly searches for the truth, even enlisting his daughter to scrape up some of McConaughey's hair for a DNA test.
It all begins on McConaughey's Texas ranch, where he's deep in a rut of writer's block, trying to pen a eulogy for his well-respected, long-passed dad before an event to celebrate his local legacy. He purrs in those whiskey-smooth, "all right, all right, all right" tones as he reads aloud from his laptop - but can't get past the opening sentence. (Been there.) He's in dire need of some solitude. But that's soon broken when the Harrelson clan arrives in a bright hippy-wagon, rocking up in a lairy shirt and flower-power trousers. From there, it's basically a ying-yang setup for the two characters: McConaughey is smooth, suave, and incredibly uptight, while Harrelson is his ultra-laid-back foil. The characters they play might be tongue-in-cheek autofiction, but their IRL chemistry is what really shines through: the kinda dudes you'd happily hit the bull ring with, before drinking the local saloon dry.
Is it a little self-indulgent? Eh, maybe, but it's also extremely self-aware, and both actors frequently rib themselves. In one episode, in a bid to prove to McConaughey's daughter that hard graft beats nepobaby name recognition, and wearing elaborate disguises, they perform terrible music together at a café - Harrelson transformed into a Woodstock rocker with a terrible Ringo Starr accent, McConaughey decked out in leather and a bald cap like Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford. Lo and behold, no one gives a shit until they take the prosthetics off.
Otherwise it's a slew of bizarre pranks, sitcom craziness, and the unravelling mystery of their maybe-brotherhood in the background. (There is also at least one direct homage to True Detective, obviously.) It's all very fun - but the biggest draw of Brothers is the chance to chill with two guys whose insane friendship runs thicker than blood.
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