I don’t think Apple did a great job of marketing this show. I don’t mean they didn’t do enough to promote it, I certainly saw enough ads for it when it first came out, I mean the campaign itself didn’t entice me to watch. I certainly saw ads for it, but despite the fact that I really like Alexander Skarsgård, it didn’t look interesting to me, I thought it was about… well, a murdering robot, like Dexter set in the future I guess. I heard a lot of positive buzz, but still nothing that really made me think this was for me.

In August I got an e-mail from Humble Bundle that they had a Martha Wells e-book package they were selling called “Murderbot & more” and the only thing I love more than cheap books, is free books (I once called the number on an LDS tv commercial because they said they’d send me a free book). I also love the fact that Humble Bundle lets you choose what percentages of the price you donate goes to the author, the charity and the HB organization. So of course I bought it.

I didn’t read any of the books right away though, because I had other media I was in the process of consuming, then I found myself at the garage a couple weeks ago waiting for them to put my snow tires on and do the required maintenance, so to kill the time, I opened All Systems Red on my phone and started reading. It was sooooo good and not at all what I was expecting. The novel is told from the point of view of a security robot (he only calls himself a Murderbot), who is contracted to protect a group of scientists on a remote planet, but would rather be spending his time watching cheesy soap operas. The story is told via his almost constant internal monologue that has this dry, almost sarcastic tone to it. He reminds me of Commander Data, if you added the personality of Marvin The Paranoid Android from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and put them in the body of a T-800. I absolutely loved the book and am about a quarter of the way through the second one now.

Given that I had heard the show was well received, I took a chance and convinced my wife to watch it with me. She too likes the wry, dark comedy style of humour in the vein of Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett, so if the show captured the feeling of the book, I thought we would both enjoy it. Spoiler warning, we did.

Now, the book is fairly short, it’s only about 170 pages, so to convert it to a ten episode tv season, even at only about thirty minutes per episode, they had to stretch things out a bit. We still have the great narration, this time provided by mister Skarsgård, in a wonderfully flat, almost bored tone that perfectly matches how I imagined SecUnit to sound when I was reading the book. It doesn’t stick to just the robot’s POV though, the other characters in the story are given a lot more to do and fleshed out considerably. It doesn’t slow anything down though, and it doesn’t change the story. All the main beats are still there, nothing was really changed, they just add a lot more colour and flesh to everything.

When I look at some of my recent favorite shows, a lot of them come from Apple. Silo, Foundation, Shrinking, Severence, Mythic Quest all are absolutely fantastic and some of the best TV I’ve seen in a long time, but I think their marketing needs to do a better job of explaining the tone of them to potential viewers, or they might overlook something they might enjoy, like I almost did with Murderbot.