Did you know that Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson might be brothers? The theory, the friendship, and the bond between the two actors becomes the heart of the comedy "Brothers"

Everyone knows the theory that Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson might be brothers. If you're not familiar with it, let's recap: one day, the mother of the Dallas Buyers Club Oscar winner, at the venerable age of ninety-four, revealed to her son that she had had a fling with his colleague's father right around the time he was conceived. When the news spread, people were ready to take the brotherhood as a given. Partly because the story seems completely absurd, yet wouldn't be surprising given Harrelson's life history — his father was a hitman sentenced to life in prison in 1979. And partly because it would explain the incredible chemistry between these two longtime friends, who in the series Brothers reunite on screen after playing the iconic pair of detectives in the cult classic True Detective.   

Brothers and True Detective are not the only times Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson have acted together. In 1999, they were the leads of EDtv, directed by Ron Howard and adapted from the Canadian film The Kid Next Door, in which the actors played none other than brothers. In Brothers, they are once again bound by a blood tie, except that instead of playing fictional characters, they portray none other than themselves. A fictional version, free of any documentary pretense, in which the actors play a fictionalized version of themselves based on "a real rumor," as the first of the eight episodes making up the Apple TV+ show states at the top of the season.

Taking the kinship hypothesis as its premise, a comedy was born, conceived by the stars together with Lee Eisenberg and David West Read. The families of Harrelson and McConaughey are present in the story, but unlike the actors themselves, they did not take part in filming, preferring to remain on set and watch what their on-screen counterparts were doing in front of the camera. An ironic and surreal situation, while the series pursues the storyline of a DNA test to find out whether the actors are truly brothers — something that, unlike in the show, has not happened in real life. According to statements they made in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, McConaughey would be afraid to take the test and discover the result — not so much because of the revelation itself, but because of having to process and put many things about his life into perspective.

This entire story — from the conjecture of possible blood ties to the creation of a series — is the most interesting part of Brothers as a whole, which in practice turns out to be less exciting or compelling than what real life has to offer. The show, which follows the standard thirty-minute comedy format, has a very strong premise that is never backed up by writing that, instead, comes across as rather bland and unoriginal. 

It is as though fiction cannot match what real life has so far delivered when it comes to the Harrelson-McConaughey relationship, staging it with tepid solutions and an uninspiring narrative thread — both in terms of the story as a whole and in its more specific comic ideas. A product from which more could have been expected, especially given the involvement of a platform like Apple TV+, which this time fails to live up to the comparable titles available on the service, let alone the show's own initial premise.