Brothers Review: Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson Are a Glib Sitcom Family

Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson recently closed out the Emmys telecast, vamping to kill time because the show was running short before they presented the Emmy for Outstanding Comedy Series to Apple TV’s Widow’s Bay. The True Detective co-stars were charming and funny, with the easy rapport of old friends who know each other very well. They were there promoting their own Apple TV comedy, Brothers, a show that celebrates their brotherhood, biological or otherwise. The show is like those five minutes expanded to four hours.

Brothers will not win the Outstanding Comedy Series Emmy next year, and it’s not trying to. But it’s a pretty fascinating show, for what it is and what it is not. It’s not a genre hybrid like Widow’s Bay. It’s not a technical feat like The Studio. It’s not a dramedy with a juicy part for a big star or a plot-driven mystery comedy with a dead body in the first scene. It’s a raunchy family sitcom that has more in common with old-school broadcast comedies than the contemporary streaming-era comedies I expected it to be like before I hit play, especially considering how this story could be told. Brothers succeeds at what it’s going for; it’s just an odd thing to be going for in the first place. 

Every episode of Brothers opens with a title card, “Based on a true rumor.” The story is that McConaughey’s mother, during a period when she was divorced from McConaughey’s father (they were married three separate times), knew, in the biblical sense, Harrelson’s father. So the boys might be half-brothers — and based on the childhood photos of both guys in the opening credits, they really do look a lot alike. In real life, they’ve never taken a DNA test to find out, but the show uses the possibility as a jumping-off point. But the “brothers” angle actually matters a lot less than the premise suggests and is on the backburner for much of the season while the show becomes a blended family sitcom about the (heavily fictionalized) McConaugheys and Harrelsons. 

5.8

Brothers

Like

• McConaughey and Harrelson are as charming as ever
• Gets better as it goes on
• Scene-stealing supporting performance from Lisa Gilroy

Dislike

• Leaves out an important part of the story
• Overly crass humor
• Hackneyed sitcom format

The story starts when the Harrelsons — Woody, his wife Joy (Brittany Ishibashi), and daughters Olive (Highdee Kuan) and Kai (Oona Yaffe) — need a change of scenery after Olive calls off her engagement. They get on their biofuel bus and drive to Texas to stay with the McConaugheys — Matthew, Valentina (Natalie Martinez), their kids Wyatt (Nolan Almeida), Clara (Ella Grace Helton), and River (Noah Carganilla), and Matthew’s mother, Ma Mac (Holland Taylor, playing a warmer, Texas-accented version of her hard-to-please matriarch role from Two and a Half Men). Together, the families get up to assorted hijinks, with wacky chaos agent Woody pushing the more traditional Matthew to loosen up and Matthew helping Woody be more responsible. The show has an old-fashioned structure, where some kind of familiar sitcommy event — Woody bringing home a dog Matthew doesn’t want, or the husbands forgetting that it’s Valentine’s Day — leads to an escalating conflict that resolves happily by the end of the episode, with lessons learned by all, sometimes earnestly, sometimes ironically. Tonally, it’s more Everybody Loves Raymond than HBO, with a crude Married…With Children edge. 

ALSO READ: The complete guide to fall TV

The sitcomminess and lowbrow humor take some getting used to, and the latter remains occasionally off-putting throughout the show (if you’re icked out when animals die violent deaths for the sake of a punchline, skip Episode 2), but as the series settles into a groove in later episodes, it gets funnier and more charming. The best part of the show has nothing to do with the brothers — it’s a subplot about McConaughey running for governor of Texas, which he considered in real life but didn’t actually do. McConaughey’s passion for his home state is palpable, and he has some great scenes with Lisa Gilroy as his hyper-intense campaign manager, Gwen Hillcrest Barnes-Davies. Gilroy is a scene-stealing comic actor on the cusp of a breakout, and everything she says on Brothers is hilarious. She’s so serious about winning campaigns that there’s nothing else in her life — “I haven’t been to the dentist in 17 years.” I would watch a Gwen Hillcrest Barnes-Davies spin-off, or any show with Gilroy in the lead role. Subplots about Olive’s relationship with her fiancé and a budding romance between Wyatt and Kai (don’t worry, she’s adopted) aren’t quite as successful, but they do have some funny and/or sweet moments.  

Executive producers McConaughey and Harrelson, who created the show with David West Read and Lee Eisenberg, are pretty merciless in making fun of themselves, with McConaughey playing himself as a self-important know-it-all who loves the sound of his own voice as he’s spouting off Lincoln ad copy like it’s his own homespun wisdom, and Harrelson as a selfish overgrown adolescent who’s all about freedom, man, unless it imposes on him doing whatever he wants. They’d be unlikable if they weren’t so dang charismatic. It’s admirable that McConaughey and Harrelson are pushing their personas to the limit like this, even if the show’s glib style kept me from feeling like I know the real them any better.

The show’s fictionalized elements and hackneyed sitcom structure are ways to avoid having to deal with complex emotions. Woody Harrelson’s father, Charles Harrelson, was a contract killer convicted of murdering a federal judge in 1979. The show alludes to him as a bad father and a criminal, but doesn’t address what he did directly or get into Harrelson and McConaughey’s real feelings about him. In some ways, the choice to distance the show from the true story is understandable. This is Harrelson and McConaughey’s real life, and they’re not obligated to share about it publicly if they don’t want to. And it would change the show’s light tone into something heavier. It’s not funny to see someone find out that the man they thought was their father biologically isn’t, and that their birth father murdered people for money. But it is a deeper story, and Brothers could have been a more honest and resonant show if it had told it. I can’t imagine what living with a connection to that kind of pain and tragedy would feel like, but Harrelson and McConaughey could have shown me. That being said, the ending of the season sets up a potential second season that would involve their father more. 

In the end, I get why McConaughey and Harrelson wanted to make a show where they’re just hanging out at a nice house in Texas together. It’s like a fun staycation for them. But I still don’t really get why they made this show — and make no mistake, this is the show they wanted to make; they paused production late in the season for a creative reset that saw West Read exit and Eisenberg join as showrunner. It’s just an unusual move for stars of McConaughey and Harrelson’s stature to create a show for themselves that can be compared to Two and a Half Men, especially when the real story has so much dramatic potential.

Premieres: Wednesday, Sept. 23 on Apple TV with two episodes, followed by a new episode each Wednesday
Who’s in it: Matthew McConaughey, Woody Harrelson, Holland Taylor, Natalie Martinez, Brittany Ishibashi, Lisa Gilroy
Who’s behind it: McConaughey, Harrelson, David West Read, Lee Eisenberg (creators)
For fans of: Scented meat
Episodes watched: 8 of 8