Apple TV’s “Lucky” is one of the most egregious examples of the “Why Isn’t This a Movie” problem of the modern streaming era. After a promising opening episode, it’s another show content to spin its wheels to meet the episode order rather than develop the story at a reasonable pace. With 10-15 minutes of plot and character development per 45-minute episode, it’s a journey during which one is constantly envisioning the great film version of the exact same story, one that cuts away so much of the fat on what could have been a lean and mean thriller. It’s just part of an epidemic of TV writing that feels almost intentionally languid so that people who are doing other things on their phones while they watch don’t have to worry about missing too much when they’re not paying attention.
The true shame here is that “Lucky” has an all-star ensemble, all of whom are doing their best to keep the slow patches moving. Like so many Apple TV shows, the producers opened the wallet for talent and attracted a fantastic cast led by Anya Taylor-Joy as the title character, Lucky Armstrong, who is introduced in a lavish Vegas suite with her husband, Cary (Drew Starkey). The two beautiful people also happen to have a duffel bag of cash, hinting they might be living large on money that doesn’t belong to them. After a night on the strip, Lucky awakens to find Cary gone, and he’s taken the money with him. Did he betray her? Or is he in trouble?
Before she knows it, Agents Billie Rand (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) and Eli Gates (Mo McRae) are leading armed officers through the casino in search of Lucky. She barely escapes but jumps out of the frying pan into the fire when she’s caught by mob underling Priscilla Matheson (Annette Bening), who also happens to be Lucky’s mother-in-law. She wants to know where the money and her son are, with assistance from a tough guy named Dutch Ocampo (Clifton Collins Jr.). Before long, we learn that both Priscilla and Dutch answer to a crime lord named Whittaker, played with chilly precision by William Fichtner.
Against all of this immediate tension, creator Jonathan Tropper, working very loosely from a book by Marissa Stapley, fills in Lucky’s back story: She is the daughter of a con man named John Armstrong (Timothy Olyphant), who trained the young Lucky in the art of the con from a very young age. The best writing on “Lucky” unpacks the complex dynamic between Lucky and John, whom Olyphant plays as a career criminal who has convinced himself he’s doing the right thing by inducting his daughter into an illegal world. He’s one of those guys who preaches how he’s just balancing the scales of an unjust society, and Olyphant deftly threads a needle in how he makes John likable without sanding down the danger inherent in a guy like this one. As he so often is, he’s the MVP.
The truth is that no one is bad in “Lucky.” Taylor-Joy gets a little lost as a character forced to react more than act, but Bening, Fichtner, Collins, and Ellis-Taylor all have memorable beats. Everything that works about “Lucky” is in the small choices made by its cast, and the show can almost be appreciated as an acting exercise, especially for hardcore fans of the ensemble. It’s filled from top to bottom with actors who are never bad and often great.
Sadly, that work is spread out across seven episodes of television instead of being allowed to shine in a 100-minute film. It’s become a bit of a tired cliché for a streaming-era critic to complain about the issues inherent when movie ideas are stretched out to fit a miniseries order, but it’s just another way to say that the pacing here is far too slack, allowing minds to wander instead of hooking viewers in. As much as the structure allows for a few of those aforementioned character beats, it also lets traits usually essential to a crime thriller like this fall away. Bluntly, it’s just far too boring, especially when it finally gets to a finale that’s easy to see coming. The producers are lucky that they landed such a talented cast to adapt Stapley’s novel, but you know what they say: Luck only gets you so far.
Whole series screened for review. Premieres with two episodes on Apple TV+ on July 15.
