Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Dustin Rowles | TV | August 7, 2026
When Lucky premiered on Apple TV several weeks ago, I’ll concede that I reviewed the series based on the first two episodes (good setup, decent action) and what I thought the show would be. I thought it had potential! I mean: How could it not, with Anya Taylor-Joy, Timothy Olyphant, Annette Bening, Clifton Collins, Jr., and Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor. And it came from Jonathan Tropper, a very good novelist who also gave us Your Friends and Neighbors and Warrior.
I still don’t understand how something with so much promise could go so terribly pear-shaped, but I was wrong, and I was wrong loudly. Lucky is not good. There’s no interesting character drama bubbling beneath the surface of the action series, because there’s no surface and there’s nothing beneath it. There are no twists coming to save it. Not even Timothy Olyphant can save it, and Timothy Olyphant saves almost everything! The man could could read a phone book during a tax audit and make it look interesting. Here, he’s stuck.
There are only two episodes left, and the “twist” (I assume) was set up to be deployed at the end of episode five. Lucky, a con woman who barely ever cons anyone because she’s too busy running, lost her husband in a chase sequence last week and managed to escape the authorities again by hiding out in an ambulance. She also found the money this week, because her husband left behind a teddy bear that reads off the account passwords when you push its tummy. Yes, really. The whole plot hinges on a talking bear.
Meanwhile, her father — Olyphant’s John — was let out of prison eight years early, because the FBI clearly wants to use him to smoke out Lucky. And by the end of the episode, Lucky lets them do exactly that: She meets her father, knowing the FBI is following him, reveals that she has the money, and then she and her father turn themselves in, presumably setting up the “twist” — that Lucky and her father will work with the FBI (probably in exchange for some kind of immunity deal) to take down Priscilla and her boss, Wayne, who are not even that interesting, despite being played by Annette Bening and William Fichtner. When you can’t make Bening and Fichtner interesting, the problem is not Bening and Fichtner.
It feels like a mediocre movie stretched into a seven-episode series, and after five episodes, none of these characters have come alive. The plot is aimless, the pace is slack, and the actors all feel like passengers in a car — sometimes figuratively, often literally — just driving around in search of a point. Will Lucky and John escape the series with their lives? That is no longer a question. Will I ever care? That’s the real question, and I very seriously doubt it.
