As a fan of Martha Wells’ award-winning, popular Murderbot Diaries book series, I’ve been dubious about Apple TV Plus’ TV adaptation Murderbot from the beginning. In part, those books are so beloved because they ride such a specific, unusual, entertaining line between straight science fiction and wry but aching comedy — a tone that would be difficult to nail on the screen. And every single Murderbot fan I’ve talked to about the show has asked me, first off, “But did they get the tone right?”
So when I got to talk to showrunners (and brothers) Paul and Chris Weitz about their TV version, the first thing I asked was how they thought about that question. According to Paul, they really tried not to.
“Tone is a little like breathing,” he says. “When you consciously think about breathing, it’s like, then you can’t breathe normally. After the fact, I think tone is almost a terrifying potential death knell for one’s work in adaptation. Maybe one of the ways of blowing the tone is to be too conscious of it.”
Image: Apple TV Plus
Instead of debating and dissecting the books’ unique feel, he says, he hoped to be “a little bit of an idiot savant,” understanding how to approach the adaptation without too much intellectualizing. “I think you hopefully have an instinctive feeling about a piece of work,” he says. “In this case, we both loved it, so that’s thing one. That doesn’t mean you’re going to be able to adapt something well, but at least it means you’re coming from a position of respect. We knew that we could not try to be Star Wars, it wasn’t Star Trek, it wasn’t Ridley Scott’s universes of Alien and Blade Runner.”
The tone issue in the Murderbot Diaries books (starting with the novella All Systems Red, which season 1 of Murderbot adapts) is built around the android protagonist, a heavily armed and armored security android that people call SecUnit, though it privately thinks of itself as Murderbot. Once Murderbot (Alexander Skarsgård in the show) jailbreaks its own operating code, it has to navigate its internal conflicts about what to do next, and the combination of repulsion and protectiveness it feels toward its human partners. The tension between its emotions and its profound discomfort with emotions has helped these books find a dedicated fandom among folks who find Murderbot relatable — neurodivergent people, queer fans, introverts, and immigrants have all seen aspects of themselves in the character. But that comedic gap between how the character thinks and how it behaves was another complicated thing for the Weitzes to navigate.
“We knew we were going to use voiceover [to tell the story], because it was the closest thing to approximating the narrative voice of the books,” Chris Weitz says. “And then we were kind of agnostic in terms of the gender of the person who was going to play it. We just had a certain set of things we wanted, which is someone who on the outside might look very imposing, but on the inside had a kind of eccentricity.
Image: Apple TV Plus
“And Alex’s case, there’s a sort of a goofiness at the heart of his performance, and with him as a person. And he really likes playing against his physical appearance. That was going to be useful in terms of us not always being able to use voiceover as a way to indicate what’s going on [with the character] internally.”
The Murderbot Diaries are funny, but it’s an off-kilter, dry humor. “We both inherently felt like the comedy was not the parody of Galaxy Quest,” Paul says. “It was coming from the character. It made sense to us the idea that the comedy was sewn in with Murderbot’s depression and cynicism, and sort of a lurking feeling of love somewhere in there.”
Murderbot series fans looking for any specific, familiar element of the books in the show won’t be disappointed — it’s a faithful rendition, from the plot to the characterization down to specific dialogue. Aspects like SecUnit’s obsession with a long-running, over-the-top space-opera serial called Sanctuary Moon have been preserved in loving detail. As the Weitz brothers put it, the question was never what to cut in adapting All Systems Red: The series’ kickoff book is short enough that it didn’t need trimming. The questions were more about what they inevitably had to add.
Image: Apple TV Plus
“Visually, Martha describes things very sparingly, so there were going to be a bunch of decisions to be made,” Chris says. “What the world was going to look like — each [choice] has an effect on tone overall.”
“Martha made herself really available to us, so we could pitch her ideas,” Paul says. “We could say, ‘Okay, we want to add this moment, which is in between moments that you have in the book. What do you think of this idea?’ And she would either be interested, or she’d say, ‘Well, how about thinking about this idea instead?’ There’s a ring of dead creatures in episode 2, around a sort of alien remnant — that was an idea Martha had. We were trying to come up with what this thing was, but it was her idea [that ended up in the show]. And so that also is reassuring in terms of tone, if you can access the author of the novels.”
Murderbot premieres on Apple TV Plus on May 16, 2025, with the first two episodes. New episodes will release on Fridays through July 11, 2025.
