Apple TV’s ‘Brothers’ Mocks Both Sides of the Aisle and Earns Its Laughs in a Strong Two-Episode Opening

Apple TV’s Brothers, the new comedy starring Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson as exaggerated versions of themselves, dropped its first two episodes on September 23. The show pulls off something rare for the streamer: it pokes fun at liberals and conservatives in equal measure and doesn’t preach to either camp. New episodes arrive weekly through the season finale on November 4.

The hook is a real-life rumor, and the show’s title card calls it exactly that. Years ago, on a family vacation in Greece, McConaughey’s mother Kay told Harrelson she had “known” his father, Charles Harrelson. McConaughey later described it on Kelly Ripa’s podcast as “a loaded K-N-E-W.” Kay and Jim McConaughey married three times, and during one of their splits she had a fling with the elder Harrelson, a convicted hitman who died in federal prison in 2007. The timing lines up with Matthew’s conception. Kay has since said only that she had “a little incident” with Woody’s father. Harrelson has pushed for a DNA test for years. McConaughey has refused, saying he would be putting his own father on the line after five decades. The two met playing brothers in EdTV in 1999 and have been close friends ever since.

The pilot, “On the Road,” had me nervous early. It opens in California, where Woody’s daughter Olive (Highdee Kuan) has just seen her engagement collapse. The first few minutes lean into jokes about men and the patriarchy while she cries, and for a stretch it looked like Apple had built another lecture with a laugh track. Then Woody loads his family into an eco-friendly bus and drives to Matthew’s ranch outside Austin, and the show finds its footing.

The Texas half of the first episode starts slow. Matthew is locked in his study working on a speech, and the Woody-versus-Matthew dynamic didn’t grab me right away. The fun moments carry it, including a bull ride and a night out that starts with Woody booking an Uber Pool and ends with the two getting a ride from a TMZ reporter.

What sold me is how the show handles politics. Woody is the California vegan environmentalist. Matthew is the Texas rancher with guns and a family hunting tradition. The writers play the liberals as hypocrites and the conservatives as gun nuts, and they don’t tip the scales toward either side. Both men look ridiculous, and both get their dignity back by the end of an episode. That’s how political comedy used to work before Hollywood decided half the audience was the punchline.

Episode two, “The Hunt,” is where the show hit its stride for me. Matthew gives his son Wyatt (Nolan Almeida) a rifle for his sixteenth birthday to carry on the McConaughey father-son deer hunt. Woody finds out his own daughters tagged along, charges into the woods, and plants himself between Wyatt’s rifle and the buck. On the drive home, mid-rant about the evils of killing animals, Woody plows into a deer with his truck and kills it. I laughed out loud. The family then holds a funeral where Woody delivers a eulogy for the animal before everyone prepares it for dinner. The scene does more than land a gag. It reveals that Wyatt never wanted to hunt and only went along to please his father, which gives Matthew’s side of the story some weight.

Woody’s investigation into whether he and Matthew are brothers runs underneath all of it. The show renames his father Clive, and Ma Mac (Holland Taylor) blames her confession on alcohol and old age the next morning. Woody doesn’t buy it. He keeps the secret from Matthew so it won’t derail the campaign, and he quietly works the oldest bars in town asking if anyone remembers Clive with Ma Mac. The thread plays off the real rumor, and the payoff promises to stretch across the season.

The governor storyline comes from McConaughey’s life too. In 2021 he floated a run against Greg Abbott, described himself as “aggressively centrist,” and never said which party he would run under. A Dallas Morning News/UT-Tyler poll that year showed him with a double-digit lead over Abbott in a head-to-head matchup. In November 2021 he posted a video calling politics “a path that I’m choosing not to take at this moment.” Brothers picks up the what-if. Matthew hires a campaign manager named Gwen (Lisa Gilroy), who essentially interviews him and his wife Valentina (Natalie Martinez) instead of the other way around, and she shoots down every earnest instinct he has. Gwen treats his folksy charm as a branding asset, his principles as liabilities, and his celebrity as a disease that has rotted his brain. The bit works because it exposes how shallow modern campaigns are, where optics decide everything and conviction gets focus-grouped out.

Critics haven’t warmed to the show. Brothers holds a 54 percent approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 51 on Metacritic. TVLine’s review complained that the women are either loud and annoying or quietly adoring, a gripe that says more about what entertainment critics expect from a comedy in 2026 than about the show itself. The production had its own drama: filming shut down in June 2025 after co-creator David West Read (Schitt’s Creek) left over creative disagreements, and The Office veteran Lee Eisenberg took over as showrunner. Paramount Television Studios, now under David Ellison’s Skydance, picked up production that August.

Two episodes in, Brothers has not pushed identity politics. No lecture scenes, no characters built as mouthpieces, and the one early stretch of man-bashing gives way fast once the families hit Texas. This is Apple TV, so I’m bracing for it to turn somewhere in the back half of the season. For now, it’s a comedy that lets two Texans with opposite worldviews argue, fail, and bury a deer together.

With Woody hiding the paternity secret to protect Matthew’s campaign, will Brothers keep its evenhanded approach to politics once the governor’s race moves to the center of the season, or will the campaign storyline become the place Apple finally picks a side?