A visually polished and at times quite riveting genre exercise, Apple TV’s Lucky taps into our endless fascination with the confluence of murder, money, and morality. The limited series kicks off with Lucinda “Lucky” Armstrong (Anya Taylor-Joy) and husband Cary Masterson (Drew Starkey) toasting the good life in their Vegas penthouse suite, celebrating a $10 million heist and the private jet ready to haul them across the border in the morning. But when Lucky collapses and awakens hours late, Cary is gone—and so is the dough.
Not helping Lucky’s Rohypnol hangover is the fact that about a hundred F.B.I. agents, led by Agent Billie Rand (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), have the entirety of Caesar’s Palace surrounded. Lucky is at its most riveting during these cat-and-mouse games, in which the odds are stacked against our antiheroine: Whether she’s handcuffed in the trunk of a gangster’s sedan or forced to schmooze her way through a ritzy children’s birthday party, the show’s refusal to chasten the gritty peril of Lucky’s predicament lends a grim irony to her name.
Not only are the feds hot on Lucky’s trail, but Malibu’s resident queenpin, Priscilla Masterson (Annette Bening), is less than pleased that her dirty money and dirtbag son are now missing. Minuscule errors of judgment can prove fatal in this twisted dynamic that takes the old adage “Don’t mix the personal and (criminally) professional” to the extreme, and plenty of bones—and hearts—get broken in the process.
At just seven 40-something-minute episodes, Lucky is a lean pulse-pounder, fitted with intricately choreographed set pieces (most notably, an extended car chase through the streets of San Diego) that flex just how much care creator Jonathan Tropper put into bringing his spectacle-filled script, adapted from Marissa Stapley’s 2021 novel, to life. But it’s in the intervals between the action where the show’s straightforwardness starts to strain.
The series is rife with characters who arrive as predigested tropes—the smooth-talking swindler, the white-whale chasing law enforcement official, and so on—and never evolve beyond them. It’s also quite humorless, a problem that nullifies most of the show’s attempts at emotional gravitas and makes its already rudimentary dialogue feel extra schlocky in spades.
A larger issue is Lucky herself. It’s hard to believe a woman as striking as Taylor-Joy could ever avoid detection as easily as she does here. And while it can be exhilarating to witness Lucky use her savviness to evade getting captured or capped, that savviness is relatively unremarkable. Inculcated into a life of crime by her conman father, John (Timothy Olyphant), Lucky was supplied such useful yet clichéd instructions as “read the room” and “trust no one,” skills she uses to compulsively exploit others’ humanity and generosity for her own gain, only later asking herself the most bourgeois of questions: “Am I a bad person?”
The answer is yes. And Lucky is most enthralling when watching its reprehensible characters scheme and steal and shoot, challenging us to interrogate just why we’re somehow still rooting for them. But the series undermines its tantalizing ambiguity by pushing us to find Lucky likeable enough for redemption, as flashbacks to her childhood underscore how little opportunity she was afforded to live any sort of lawful, peaceful existence.
This is all well and good, but Tropper never fleshes out Lucky’s desires beyond mere survival. The series doesn’t provide Lucky with a level of interior depth that matches its high-octane panache. Far more compelling of a character is Priscilla, a coldblooded killer who can turn from deliciously menacing to pathetically desperate on a dime, and who represents a magic mirror to whom Lucky could become if she doesn’t get out of this lifestyle while she can.
Curiously, the series forgoes the novel’s central hook, in which Lucky wins a mega lottery jackpot and can’t cash the ticket without being caught by the authorities or gangsters out to get her. It’s a telling omission, as Lucky sidesteps what could have been something a bit sharper and more original in favor of its tale of familial issues, mobster mentality, and individualistic corruption.
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Or to put it more simply, it’s the same as everything on Apple TV. Complete middlebrow rubbish but with just that slightly more thickly applied veneer of sophistication than Netflix can afford.