What makes a feminine rage story worth watching? What keeps us rewatching Gone Girl and remaking Carrie over and over again? There’s something so invigorating about a woman leaving it all behind and seeking revenge on those who wronged her, and what makes that even more intriguing is when she’s constantly outsmarting those around her.
Gone Girl and Carrie have another thing in common: they’re both book adaptations. Lucky, Apple TV’s latest thriller series, was also originally a book, but in the careful hands of Jonathan Tropper and Anya Taylor-Joy, it’s an instant classic full of heartstopping sequence after heartstopping sequence.
Lucky opens with an episode-long chase scene, and it keeps up that momentum every step of the way.
Lucky follows Luciana “Lucky” Armstrong on the worst day of her life: after running away with her husband (Drew Starkey) and millions of dollars, she wakes up groggy and alone, with both her spouse and their haul nowhere to be seen. What’s worse, it’s only a matter of time before the FBI, led by no-nonsense agent Billie Rand (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), is onto her. Without a second thought, she smudges eyeshadow under her eyes and approaches a laundry delivery van driver. She whips up a few tears, saying something about her boyfriend. The driver is suspicious, but lets her in.
This is the series in a nutshell: Lucky finds herself in a pickle that’s seemingly impossible to escape, but since she’s been trained by her con man father (Timothy Olyphant), she lies and cheats to find her way out of every chase and confrontation. That sounds like it would get old quickly, but the pace never lets up, making for an “oops, all set pieces” plot that plummets forward all in the course of a few days.
Lucky’s criminal past with her conman father is played out in flashbacks throughout the series.
Anya Taylor-Joy is an unstoppable force as Lucky, but there are a few immovable objects in her way from equally powerful performers. Olyphant is a seasoned morally gray actor after his iconic turn in Justified, but the real breakout is Annette Bening, who plays Lucky’s mother-in-law in a way that eschews the girlboss route for something a lot more similar to the glowering parents in Anora.
Much of this series feels like the third act of a female-led thriller episode stretched out over eight episodes, but that’s one of its advantages. Showrunner Jonathan Tropper obviously knows his way around a fast-paced story — he’s the writer for the upcoming Shawn Levy/Ryan Gosling movie Star Wars: Starfighter — and he leans into that hard. If the climax is the best part of the story, why not make a show that uses what would normally be the climax as the baseline?
It may get a bit overstimulating at times, but Lucky is a tour-de-force in all-in, fun, experimental television. This is the TV equivalent of a great time at the movies, and it should stand alongside its fellow feminine rage stories for decades to come.
