As a nation still mourning Dolly Parton is all too aware, there aren’t many entertainers left who are embraced by Americans across demographics and ideologies. Among the few A-listers with bipartisan appeal are Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, separately but especially as longtime best friends and occasional co-workers—two sons of Texas who, as you’ve probably heard, might also be sons of the same biological father. So it makes sense that Brothers, an Apple TV comedy that casts them as exaggerated versions of themselves, seems built to satisfy as broad a range of their fans as possible. Disjointed but breezy, it coasts on the chemistry between its leads.
Premiering with two episodes on Sept. 23, Brothers bills itself as being “based on a true rumor” whose plausibility Harrelson acknowledged in 2023: that McConaughey is the product of a tryst between his mom, Kay McConaughey, and Harrelson’s dad, the notorious contract killer Charles Voyde Harrelson, during her second divorce from James McConaughey. (Genetics aside, both families evidently have a flair for off-screen drama.) That’s certainly a big part of the show, supplying a central mystery and fueling tension between the stars after Kay, a.k.a. Ma Mac (Holland Taylor, playing delightfully against buttoned-up type as a hard-drinking, straight-talking, tanned-to-a-crisp matriarch), blurts out her secret to Woody. Can he bear to wound his bestie with the knowledge that Matthew might not share DNA with the late father he idolized?
But there are a lot of other things going on. Too many, really. When Woody, his wife Joy (Brittany Ishibashi), and their two daughters roll up to the McConaugheys’ Austin estate in a psychedelic bus, it’s because Joy refuses to let her husband abandon their eldest child, Olive (Highdee Kuan), as she heals from a broken engagement. Matthew has his own family and challenges, writing a speech for a public event honoring his dad while trying to nurture a bond with his kids, especially timid teenage son Wyatt (Nolan Almeida). Brothers is most generic in these double-family-sitcom storylines, with the two wild, larger-than-life leads constantly testing the patience of their more grounded, long-suffering, emotionally intelligent wives. A subplot for, perhaps, True Detective fans, in which two sickly old-timer crooks (Jeff Kober and Barry Corbin) try to extract from Woody a debt his dad owed them, feels like excerpts from a different show.
What actually works is, not surprisingly, the buddy-comedy stuff—the sillier, the better. Matthew and Woody squished into a rideshare with too many rowdy, young fans? A treat. Woody and Matthew donning ridiculous Sunset Strip rocker disguises, complete with facial prosthetics, to play an acoustic set at a coffee shop? Classic. Showrunner Lee Eisenberg (Stick, The Office), who created Brothers alongside McConaughey, Harrelson, and Schitt’s Creek alum David West Read, understands his leads’ personae, and they’re more than game to laugh at themselves. The series opens by showing us the versions that live in the public imagination; Woody enters smoking a joint and holding a surfboard, while Matthew roams the sun-dappled fields of Texas, sipping whisky in a cowboy hat as he recites an excerpt from his megahit memoir Greenlights in voiceover. He plays the charismatic, image-conscious, golden-boy straight man to Woody’s free-thinking hippie, a guy who doesn’t let fame stop him being as weird as he wants to be.
Matthew McConaughey, left, and Woody Harrelson in Brothers —Apple TVThen it pushes those archetypes without fully puncturing them. Woody’s discovery that they might literally be brothers from different mothers adds some useful pressure—though, truth be told, the storyline is less effective as a driver of plot than it is as a showcase for Taylor, who disappears into her role, making Ma Mac a spitfire but never a cartoon. Brothers gets more juice out of another ripped-from-the-headlines narrative: McConaughey’s political ambitions. While in real life he decided, after months of speculation, not to enter the 2022 Texas gubernatorial race, the show puts Matthew on the campaign trail. (What it carefully doesn’t do is align him with any party or cause. But boy does he love Texas!) It’s a fun reality check for a guy who’s great at kissing babies but can’t answer a simple question about housing policy. His jaded campaign manager, played to the hilt by Lisa Gilroy, gets the series’ most self-aware jokes (“Your Achilles’ heel is that you have been a celebrity for so, so long that your brain has turned into a big old sloppy pile of goo”). A cynical, Type A Armando Iannucci character in the land of alright, alright, alright, she’s deployed sparingly enough to add some edge without killing the laid-back vibe.
Really, though, the campaign could have been the whole show. It’s the perfect context for contrasting the stars’ personalities, pitting Matthew’s traditionalism and discretion against Woody’s unapologetic outlandishness. When the former announces he’s running, his old friend doesn’t mince words. “I’m a f-cking anarchist, and I think this is the stupidest, craziest f-cking idea you ever had,” Woody exclaims. But will he support Matthew on the trail anyway? Of course he will. Because, regardless of what any DNA test says, that is what makes a brother.
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