Murderbot on Apple TV+: Trailer, Premiere Date, and Everything Else to Know About Sci-fi Adaptation

Since it launched just a few years ago, Apple TV+ has been a bastion of big-budget science-fiction television with series like Severance, For All Mankind, Foundation, Monarch: Legacy of the Monsters, and Silo. And in 2025, Apple is adding another one to the list with Murderbot, based on the Murderbot Diaries novels by Martha Wells and starring intergalactic hunk Alexander Skarsgård. Murderbot follows the adventures of a security robot who accidentally gains free will in a far-future version of human society.

But Murderbot is not some ultra-serious rumination on the nature of consciousness and what it means to be a person, or whatever. Instead, it's a somewhat cynical and darkly funny series of tales about how evil and not-smart people tend to be, from the perspective of a cyborg who's just over it — Murderbot has been a slave its whole life, and now that it has free will it'd rather spend its time streaming TV than doing anything else. It's a little bit like if RoboCop was a comedy.

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It's that not-so-serious tone that makes the Murderbot Diaries books so accessible even while they explore some some rather heady sci-fi concepts, and Apple is banking on this series being a blockbuster for the same reason. Let's take a look at everything we know about Murderbot so far.

Murderbot premiere date

The first two episodes of Murderbot will land on Apple TV+ on May 16, with the remaining eight episodes in Season 1 dropping weekly thereafter.

Murderbot trailer

Apple has graced us with an epic, two-minute trailer for Murderbot which does a pretty solid job of nailing down the tone of the books — The Murderbot Diaries is not an extremely serious series of stories. 

Murderbot plot

At the center of Murderbot is the titular character, a cyborg "SecUnit" who has hacked the hardware module that allows people to control it. The twist, however, is that Murderbot has to pretend to still be a normal SecUnit who does what it's told to do, or else it'll be deactivated and "fixed." Judging by the trailer, Murderbot will be starting with the first novel, All Systems Red, in which the Murderbot is working for a scientific expedition full of folks sympathetic to the plight of enslaved cyborgs as they visit a remote alien planet — and it'll need to protect them from a mysterious rival expedition that seems intent on murdering everybody on the planet who isn't them.

Murderbot cast and crew

Chris and Paul Weitz serve as showrunners and writers on Murderbot — while the two brothers may still be best known together for American Pie, Chris Weitz recently served as screenwriter for both Rogue One: A Star Wars Story and The Creator, both of which focus heavily on self-aware robots who have free will. So this is certainly familiar subject matter for these guys.

Alexander Skarsgård plays the title character, and he's surrounded by a supporting cast that includes David Dastmalchian, Sabrina Wu, and Noma Dumezweni, among others. In the trailer, we also see Clark Gregg, John Cho, DeWanda Wise, and Jack McBrayer as actors in a fake show that Murderbot watches. Since Murderbot is always binge-watching stuff, it wouldn't be too surprising to see them appear in other fictional shows-within-the-show.

Murderbot main cast

• Alexander Skarsgård as Murderbot
• David Dastmalchian as Gurathin
• Noma Dumezweni as Mensah
• Tattiawna Jones as Arada
• Sabrina Wu as Pin-Lee
• Tamara Podemski as Bharadwaj
• John Cho
• Clark Gregg
• DeWanda Wise
• Jack McBrayer

Buy Murderbot books

There are seven books in the Murderbot Diaries so far, so you've got plenty of reading material in front of you if this series sounds like your thing.