Anya Taylor-Joy plays a shape-shifting con artist in Apple TV+‘s new limited series Lucky. This Lucky Apple TV review from The Hollywood Reporter finds a show that never settles on one tone across its seven episodes. The series adapts Marissa Stapley‘s novel, with a script from Jonathan Tropper. It drops most of the book’s plot for a chase built around a con that happens before the story even starts.
Taylor-Joy’s Lucky and her husband Cary, played by Drew Starkey, spend one last night in Las Vegas. They plan to flee the country with roughly $10 million skimmed from a family scam. Lucky’s grandmother Priscilla, played by Annette Bening, ran the scheme with a partner named Whittaker, played by William Fichtner. Lucky’s incarcerated father John, played by Timothy Olyphant, set it in motion years earlier. Once the money disappears, Priscilla’s enforcer Dutch and FBI agent Rand, played by Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, both start closing in.
What our Lucky Apple TV review found
The Hollywood Reporter’s review argues that the series strips out the novel’s central plotlines. Those include Lucky’s search for her birth mother and a winning lottery ticket she cannot cash. In their place is a pursuit structure closer to Paper Moon than to Stapley’s book. Director Jonathan Van Tulleken handles the pilot as an extended chase through casinos and rest stops. The review calls it entertaining, even as Taylor-Joy’s disguises fail to hide how distinctive she looks.
The momentum fades in the middle episodes. Exposition repeats across three separate pursuers, and the pacing suffers for it. The review notes the show falls well short of Taylor-Joy’s previous limited series, Queen’s Gambit. Its core complaint lands directly: “It’s a show about an identity-swapping heroine that has no sense of its own identity.”
A fourth episode, directed by Jet Wilkinson, is titled “Are We Bad People?” It centers on a car chase through Long Beach, standing in for San Diego. The review says the surrounding dialogue leans too hard into stating the show’s themes out loud, rather than letting the plot carry them. Priscilla’s enforcer Clifton Collins Jr. gets similarly thin material. He is present mainly to keep the pursuit moving between the bigger confrontations.
A strong cast stuck with thin characters
Bening gets singled out for carrying a role the writing barely defines. Beyond a love of horses and a disappointing son, Priscilla has little else to work with. Ellis-Taylor’s Agent Rand suffers from a similar problem: her backstory gets delivered by other characters instead of earned on screen. Supporting players Mo McRae and Eric Lange, cast as a partner and a boss, get even less to work with.
Olyphant fares better. He uses his scenes with Taylor-Joy to show the toll of being raised by a career con man. Still, the review says the character never fully comes together either. The review points to the seven-episode format itself as part of the problem. The series is too long to sustain its lighter chase scenes, and too short to develop its ensemble beyond archetypes.
Anything shorter might have hidden the thin supporting cast. Anything longer might have given the story room to breathe. All seven episodes of Lucky are streaming now on Apple TV+, closing out with a theme song from Fiona Apple.