Anya Taylor-Joy’s ‘Lucky’ is so stupid and so good

Veteran couch potatoes know that Apple TV is currently the best streaming service. Netflix is a year away from casting Tilly Norwood in every series. HBO Max is still being run by a slash-and-burn expert whose sense of the zeitgeist is stuck somewhere around 1990. And Paramount+ is populated almost exclusively by 44-minute pickup ads. I can’t count on any of the aforementioned streamers to actually care about my needs as an educated viewer. Apple TV, for whatever reason, does. 

It knows that I want a disheveled Gary Oldman dishing out vicious burns to all of the young’uns forced to work for him. It gives “Severance” creator Dan Erickson as long of a hiatus as he needs — and it’s always a long one — to make every season of his show unbearably suspenseful from wire to wire. And Apple knows that sometimes, I just want a simple show that puts a real-deal star in front of the camera and then gets out of their way.

That brings us to “Lucky,” based on Marissa Stapley’s pulp novel and starring Anya Taylor-Joy as the title character. “Lucky” is four episodes into its inaugural season. It isn’t highbrow content. In fact, it’s probably one of the more idiotic shows I’ve elected to binge-watch lately. It also might be the best TV show I’ll watch all year, because few other shows are as willing to lean into their inherent absurdity as much as this one.

Here’s some spoiler-y proof. Our story opens in Vegas, where Taylor-Joy’s Lucky and her boy toy Cary (Drew Starkey, whose face you’ll hate) have just stolen a whole bunch of cash from an unknown source and are unwisely celebrating their windfall instead of running very far away, very quickly. Lucky wakes up the next morning to discover that the hubby has ghosted her and taken the millions with him. When Lucky needs to flee the scene before the cops, or a shady mob guy with shady mob guy product in his hair, find her, she cannily disguises herself in designer jeans and a designer hoodie, and hey presto! She DISAPPEARS out of the casino. Then she stops off to give herself a flawless DIY cut-and-color so she can look like a different traffic-stopping style icon than she looked like before. Even when Anya Taylor-Joy gets her ass kicked and is locked inside a car trunk, she still absolutely looks like Anya Taylor-Joy. You and I could spot that face from a mile away. Then Lucky crashes a rich lady’s cocktail party, steals all of the swag lying around the house, and walks out of there looking like she’s about to walk a Paris runway. Now you and I could spot her from a solar system away.

But the cops and mobsters can’t! “Lucky” includes a lot of Stupid Guy Show stock characters. In addition to the oily mob enforcer (Clifton Collins Jr.), we’ve got an FBI agent who takes this case way too personally (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor), her whipping boy sidekick who has shrewder hunches than the boss expected (Mo McRae), and a ruthless mobster played by an acclaimed actor overqualified for the role (Annette Bening). Bening, who’s great in everything, is Cary’s mother. And Cary, we later find out, is actually married to Lucky. That makes Bening Lucky’s mother-in-law. She also just happens to be fresh out of jail and wrapped up in an ambiguous fossil fuel scam (I think?). Oh, and it’s her money that Lucky and her man stole. Hence, Bening’s Priscilla Masterson wants Lucky dead, and she also might want her traitor son dead too. Because Priscilla isn’t the top gasoline mafioso in LA. She reports to a guy named Wayne (William Fichtner), and it’s HIS money that she was tasked with overseeing. Now Wayne is pissed, and you don’t want a William Fichtner character pissed.

Meanwhile, Lucky’s dad (Timothy Olyphant) is a small-time crook stuck in jail whom Lucky periodically rings up for advice on doing crimes. It takes a few episodes for the old man to tell Lucky, “Hey man, maybe it’s unwise to hash out your fugitive getaway plans when this jail phone is probably tapped,” but by then, I didn’t care. I was too busy enjoying all of these great actors chewing on every available piece of scenery in between big action set pieces. And when the show got REALLY stupid this past week and veered into pure soap opera territory, I became even more invested. Was I surprised when I found out that all of these characters share a history with one another? No. Did I laugh out loud when Lucky’s husband hides the stolen cash by converting all of it to bitcoin? Did I ever! Drew Starkey has a face for crypto, and showrunner Jonathan Tropper was wise to exploit it.

Tropper is no stranger to dad movie-level entertainment. He was the guy behind “Banshee,” a great not-so-smart action show created by Warner Bros. in the 2010s in an ill-fated attempt to create a Cinemax original programming brand apart from HBO. Apple TV gives Tropper a more prestigious imprimatur this time around, much in the same way it does with another Tropper creation, the Jon Hamm vehicle “Your Friends and Neighbors.” But with both that show and “Lucky,” Tropper doesn’t let his new home give him any airs of pretension. “Lucky” starts off trashy and never lets up. When I spotted a spare screwdriver lying around in one critical scene, I immediately thought, “Someone is gonna get stabbed in the head with that thing.” Minutes later, my prescience was rewarded. That screwdriver was Chekhov’s screwdriver.

There is an art to this kind of show. It’s not something you can create by asking an AI prompt to make it for you. And it’s not something that you can entrust to just any random showrunner, or just any random, Gal Gadot-level actor in your cast. No no, a show like “Lucky” takes real work. It takes a quietly excellent writing staff (Priscilla on her son: “I still have to kill spiders for him”), an executive producer with serious creative juice (Reese Witherspoon, who chose the “Lucky” novel for her book club in 2021), and a magnetic cast. “Lucky” has all of those things going for it. In fact, it’s not unlike Apple’s most recent Emmy nominee, “Widow’s Bay,” which is also quite silly (Yar! This island be cursed!) but also boasts a murderers’ row of actors (with global treasure Matthew Rhys at its center) and a creative team that takes the show’s premise as seriously as if it were staging a production of “Hamlet.”

Both of those shows, along with HBO Max’s “The Pitt,” are establishing a new genre of middlebrow entertainment, one that echoes the great middlebrow network programs of yore while also elevating the genre by using prestige TV-level talent. No one is gonna mistake “Lucky” for “Mad Men” anytime soon, but not every TV show has to be some landmark entry into the canon. Sometimes a TV show can just be a TV show, and “Lucky” excels at being just that.