Murderbot arrived on Apple TV+ last month and already looks set to be a future classic

Packaged in short episodes, often under 25 minutes, Murderbot on Apple TV+ may just be one of the most amusing new shows of 2025. Based on Martha Wells’ bestselling Hugo and Nebula Award-winning book series The Murderbot Diaries, the show is a sci-fi thriller/comedy about a self-hacking security construct who is horrified by human emotion yet drawn to its vulnerable clients. Played by Alexander Skarsgård, it must hide its free will and complete a dangerous assignment when all it really wants is to be left alone to watch futuristic soap operas and figure out its place in the universe.

What is Murderbot about?

Set in a future where the galaxy seems under the sway of a ruthless corporation, a group of counter culture scientists has permission to survey a planet for minerals. The downside is, they have to take a security android with them, a so-called SecUnit. The one they choose just happens to be one whose governor unit no longer functions, hacked by the SecUnit itself, now calling itself Murderbot. This isn’t a simple tale of Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics setting a scene for a mystery, but just one in which the Murderbot hacked itself as it was bored, alongside a healthy disdain for humanity at large, in general in actual.

So, what does an ungoverned android do?

The answer is in the first paragraph — it downloads hundreds of episodes of space operas and watches them while its subroutines watch for danger. It mixes that with watching the humans and being ruder about them. Its favourite show — The Fall and Rise of Sanctuary Moon. Think mad version of Star Trek and more extreme than The Orville season 1. To give a flavour, here’s the opening credits:

If that’s not reason alone to watch the show, there’s a minor matter of unexpected gargantuan creatures and rogue killing machines from another survey base. New episodes are released on Fridays, so you’ve plenty of time to get up to speed for this week’s instalment.