Anya Taylor-Joy Runs, But Timothy Olyphant Steals (Scenes)

Lucky premiered on Apple TV this week with its first two episodes. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Lucky, a con-woman who, along with her husband, Cary (Drew Starkey), makes off with $10 million. After a night of drinking and celebrating, however, Lucky wakes up in the morning to find that Cary has left, along with the money. The FBI is after her for stealing $10 million in taxpayer money, and she’s also being pursued by a ruthless mob boss, Priscilla Matheson (Annette Bening), who also happens to be her mother-in-law. The only ally that Lucky seems to have is her father, John (Timothy Olyphant), who talks to her occasionally from inside prison.

What’s interesting at the outset here is that the original con that drives the plot is vague and largely beside the point. Lucky’s father, John, had something to do with skimming the money that Lucky and Cary eventually stole, but we don’t actually see the heist unfold (at least not in the first two episodes). Lucky is not about that; it’s about the chase. It’s about Lucky using her talents as a con artist to manipulate others into helping her outrun Johnny Law and her mobster mother-in-law and her henchman, Dutch (played by the always reliable Clifton Collins Jr.).

Ultimately, what becomes clear throughout the first two episodes is that this is not a mystery — save for Lucky trying to figure out why her husband ran away with the loot — but presumably a family melodrama packaged as a fast-paced, action-forward game of cat-and-mouse.

And it mostly works here because Lucky is working with a hell of a cast. Even from inside prison, Timothy Olyphant has all the charm you might expect, only he’s delivering it not as a romantic interest but as a father. And as much as I like John, it’s hard not to wonder if there’s more than a little self-interest in his fatherly wisdom. Is the one person Lucky can trust actually using her?

That’s not clear, but elsewhere, Annette Bening’s Priscilla has her own issues: It’s her son who’s run off with the money, Priscilla’s boss wants to kill him, and Priscilla herself insists she’s not above killing her own daughter-in-law to locate her son and the money. The show, I suspect, will be a lot about how these parents navigate their relationships with their criminal children, and vice versa.

But also, there’s a lot of running, gunfire, and dead bodies left in Lucky’s wake. She doesn’t escape the bad guys (the mobsters) or the good guys (the FBI) without some collateral damage. And the action keeps our attention while Lucky presumably builds these relationships and starts to play out the melodrama.

It’s decent. It goes a little too heavy on the action in the first two episodes at the expense of the characters, though I hope the series quickly rights that ship. It’s not going to be Apple TV’s next Widow’s Bay or Shrinking or even Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, but it is considerably better than the streamer’s other action fare like The Last Frontier and Hijack, though the bar isn’t exactly high. It’s not what Apple TV does best, but Lucky mostly makes up for it in the casting.