By George & Josh Bate
The following is a NON-SPOILER review of all seven episodes of Apple TV’s Lucky
An all-star cast. A premium streaming service. Based on a bestselling novel. Unfortunately, none of the (many) things the new series Lucky has going for it sufficiently render it anything more than mediocre television.
Based on the novel of the same name by Marissa Stapley, Lucky stars Anya Taylor-Joy as Lucky, a con artist who recently pulled off a daring heist with her husband Cary (Drew Starkey). Lucky’s world is upended when she wakes up the morning after the heist to discover that Cary has run away with all the money, leaving her penniless and firmly in the crosshairs of a determined law enforcement agent (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and a dangerous crime lord (Annette Bening).
Lucky marks the latest Apple TV series created, showrun, written, and executive produced by Jonathan Tropper. The screenwriter who signed an overall deal with Apple TV wrote the overlooked Jason Momoa-led sci-fi drama See and is currently working on season three of Your Friends & Neighbors, the witty riff on Breaking Bad starring Jon Hamm. Prior to these shows, Trooper was the creator and showrunner of Banshee, an underrated television gem of the mid-2010s.
Needless to say, Trooper has developed quite the reputation for compelling television in recent years, a track record that has correlated with him earning a screenwriting credit on Shawn Levy’s upcoming Star Wars movie. But Lucky represents a rare misstep for Tropper and Apple TV.
The new series comes from Marissa Stapley’s 2021 novel of the same name, a short and fast-paced crime thriller that, while entertaining, didn’t last for long in the memory after the final chapter came to an end. To develop a seven-episode series based on the novel meant that Tropper and company had to expand upon Stapley’s work with characters and subplots not featured in the source material.
One of the most glaring changes between the book and the series is that the latter entirely omits two key elements of the former’s story. In the novel, Lucky discovers that she has a winning lottery ticket that she is unable to cash in as it would lead to her detection and subsequent arrest by law enforcement. She also tries to find her mother, who abandoned her when she was a baby. While retaining these narrative strands may not have elevated Lucky to new heights, their exclusion is bewildering considering how utterly routine and unfeeling the final product ultimately proves to be.
After compelling for the bulk of its first episode with an extended chase sequence through the halls and casino floors of Caesar’s Palace, Lucky quickly demonstrates just how unremarkable it is. The story of a thief on the run from those she stole from is hardly unique, meaning that the series has to rely on attributes beyond its narrative to stand out.
But the series fails to do that, instead telling a story that frustrates and baffles more than it intrigues and fascinates. As flashbacks and expository dialogue poorly orient the audience to important events that occurred prior to the show, Lucky becomes all the more unnecessarily head-scratching with a winding plot filled to the brim with implausibilities and conveniences. One or two are easy to overlook, but Tropper’s series asks the viewer to do away with critical thinking and simply go with the flow far too often. How did this person know that? How did this other person know this glaringly obvious thing? Why did this other person make such a decision? These are the kinds of tedious questions that dominate one’s thinking while watching Lucky and remove any of the groundedness or authenticity from an already subpar story.
As the episodes push and pull Lucky from one dilemma to the next, the series underwhelms with every one of its core relationships. Anya Taylor-Joy’s titular character was raised to be a cunning thief by her father John, played by Timothy Olyphant. John is warm and loving toward Lucky, but it is clear that his decision to prepare her for a life of crime has its pitfalls. Coupled with the fact that it is John’s actions that arguably put Lucky in some of the danger she is in, the series teases a potentially interesting father-daughter dynamic in which Lucky is forced to come to terms with how harmful her father’s behavior truly is. Lucky squanders this opportunity, however, by pushing an excellent Olyphant to the periphery for much of the series. It is no coincidence that, when he plays a more sizable role in the final few episodes, the series picks up considerably. Olyphant and Taylor-Joy play a beautiful father-daughter duo but are let down by thin, predictable writing that gives neither the chance to portray the nuances of a complex relationship in particularly compelling fashion.
Then there’s a cat-and-mouse game between Lucky and Agent Billie Rand, a stoic and unflinching FBI agent determined to find Lucky and use her to take Annette Bening’s Priscilla Matheson down. Without ever providing context for why Agent Rand is so motivated to put an end to Priscilla’s criminal exploits, she is left to be more of a caricature than a full-fledged character. Her cookie-cutter law enforcement role adds a modicum of urgency and stakes to the proceedings but overwhelmingly does little to justify her prominence in the series.
Also pursuing Lucky is Bening’s Priscilla, a mob boss determined to retrieve the money that Lucky stole from her. There’s potential for rather interesting character work here as Priscilla’s son Cary is the same man that collaborated with Lucky to steal the money and then ran off with the money himself. This puts Priscilla in a challenging spot, especially as an even bigger and more threatening mob boss played by William Fichtner breathes down her neck. None of this works, however, as Bening is painfully stiff and delivers a performance more fitting for a run-of-the-mill 90s action movie than it is an Apple TV television series premiering in 2026.
Drew Starkey’s Cary, meanwhile, and his betrayal of Lucky marks arguably the most interesting arc in the series, although it is similarly underserved by poor writing. Starkey plays a disappointingly minor role in the series and, as such, little attention is afforded to fleshing out how a woman reckons with the fact that the man she married and loves betrayed her so egregiously.
Throughout all of these underwhelming plot threads, Anya Taylor-Joy does her best to keep a rather dull and uninspired show afloat. The Furiosa actress commits to the physicality, anxiety, and competence of a character born to be a thief and now made to use her skills to get out of a seemingly impossible dilemma. However, there is only so much Taylor-Joy can do with such overwritten, cringe-worthy dialogue. Lucky has hardly any personality for the first few episodes and only begins to emerge out of her shell in the last few installments, although it is too little too late at this point.
The seventh and final episode encapsulates everything wrong with Lucky. Wrapping up the plot with so many conveniences and asking the audience to overlook any semblance of logic, the story resolves far too neatly and leaves one relieved that a series so devoid of novelty has finally come to an end.
VERDICT: 4/10
Based on the novel by Marissa Stapley, the new Apple TV series Lucky squanders an all-star cast with a painfully routine story filled to the brim with implausibilities, conveniences, and gaps in logic. The show from creator Jonathan Tropper marks a rare misstep for the writer who masterminded Banshee, See, Warrior, and Your Friends & Neighbors, and for Apple TV more generally, as it struggles to stretch an already short novel into seven episodes of television. Every one of the core relationships at the heart of the show underwhelm and are underserved by thin writing that fails to give them the complexity and attention they deserve. Anya Taylor-Joy does her best to keep the dull and uninsured show afloat, but even her committed turn can’t salvage seven episodes that frustrate with how many questions they pose and don’t even remotely begin to answer. Convoluted, overwritten, and unoriginal, Lucky is far from lucky.