It takes a lot to convince me to fork out for adding a streaming service to the roster nowadays, considering I long ago cut D+ and whatever they’re calling HBO’s service this week out of the budget. Especially when the service in question is tied to the “fruit logo” financial ecosystem.

But dagnabbit, I really love the Murderbot series of novels & novellas from Martha Wells. And everything I read & watched about the upcoming show convinced me to give it a try.

Am I happy with my purchase? Oh, goodness yes.

With that said, I should clarify a few things about my endorsement of the show.

For starters, while I’ve read and re-read all of the main line books as well as a few of the side shorts, my ability to remember all the fiddly details is… basically nonexistent. Am I certain that this or that element of the show is or isn’t book-accurate? Of course not. Do I care? Also of course not. Because the key thing is that any TV adaptation must, indeed, adapt.

Getting people who grok the source material helps. Everyone involved seems to have absolutely understood the assignment, from writers through actors and on to all of the technical aspects. For all that “tall conventionally-attractive white guy” wouldn’t have been my (or indeed most folks’) first pick for portraying our neurotic favorite SecUnit, Alexander Skarsgård is nailing it. And everyone they’ve surrounded him with on the screen is superb, a multi-cultural selection of amazing players inhabiting their roles with gusto. I love spending a half hour with these charming, delightful characters every week. (Even Gurathin.)

Yes, a half hour. They’re adapting the first Murderbot novella, and trying to stretch that modest-sized work into ten whole hours (or the 42-minute chunks that used to comprise a broadcast TV hour, even) would’ve strained the source material to the breaking point. Given that this is being billed as a sci-fi action comedy, going with a sitcom-sized episode length fits perfectly.

The adaptation choices made so far are (mostly) brilliant: Trim down the PresAux roster a skosh to keep the character limit down, making group scenes a bit less of a logistical nightmare. Create actual snippets of the cheesy show-within-a-show The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. (Side note: oh, John Cho, I wish Netflix’s Cowboy Bebop hadn’t been such a disaster, for your sake.) Add a [spoiler] character for [spoiler] reasons to grease the plot wheels a bit.

That sort of thing.

We also don’t get the tiny drones which are such a big part of the printed original’s storytelling, but I suppose a budget’s a budget. I don’t mind losing those if it means not (further?) overworking and/or underpaying the VFX crew.

The show’s a bit past the halfway mark in its run and I feel reasonably confident that they’ll stick the landing… and I really hope the showrunners get to carry this team forward to future installments.

I might even re-up my Apple TV sub when the time comes.