A woman is forced back into a life of crime after being double-crossed by the person she loves most in Apple TV's new thriller series Lucky.
Apple TV has been on a remarkable hot streak this year with the charming Margot's Got Money Troubles, Shrinking, Widow's Bay and the remake of Cape Fear. Lucky, starring Anya Taylor-Joy, looked like and quickly became one of the most anticipated shows of 2026.
I wanted to love this series so badly. Well, was I wrong.
The story follows Luciana "Lucky" Armstrong (Taylor-Joy), a young woman who grows up running petty scams alongside her father John (Timothy Olyphant).
After a sting operation lands her father in prison, Lucky and her husband decide to pull off one final score before fleeing the country. With US$10 million in hand, the seemingly happy couple celebrate with one last wild night in Las Vegas before disappearing forever.
But Lucky wakes up the next morning hungover and discovers that her husband has vanished with the money. Hunted by both the FBI and dangerous criminals who want her dead, she must recover the cash before time runs out.
Anya Taylor-Joy is one of my favourite actresses working today. Over the years, she has proven her ability to excel across a wide range of genres, from horror and drama to action, and she has an uncanny ability to make almost any character fascinating. Her striking screen presence and distinctive charisma are exactly why I was most excited to watch this show. Lucky asks Taylor-Joy to play a woman raised by a con artist who is desperately trying to leave her criminal past behind, only to be pulled back into one last desperate adventure. She delivers the goods. This is not only a physically demanding performance but one that constantly forces her to navigate the blurry line between victim and perpetrator.
The series unfolds over the course of just a few days, creating a compressed timeline that gives the story a strong sense of urgency. The pressure never lets up, and the list of people pursuing Lucky is far from limited to a single threat.
That uncertainty creates an atmosphere where neither Lucky nor the audience knows who can be trusted. Despite its brisk pacing, this is not a full-blown action series. It functions more as a mystery thriller with bursts of action designed to amplify the suspense.
There are car chases, brutal close-quarters fights and narrow escapes that effectively blend tension with excitement, even if some of the beats become kind of predictable.
Lucky is, after all, a career scam artist who has spent her life manipulating people for money. Yet Taylor-Joy manages to inject genuine humanity into a character who could easily have come across as cold and emotionally distant.
Honestly, Lucky can be a genuinely thrilling production at times. The show moves at such a relentless pace that it rarely gives you a chance to catch your breath. The action is well staged, and much of the suspense comes from watching Lucky get thrown into one dangerous situation after another. We are constantly wondering how she is going to escape these seemingly impossible predicaments.
One of the series' greatest pleasures is watching her rely on her intelligence rather than brute force. Whether she sneaks into a party and steals clothes from a closet to blend in, or impersonates a dying woman's relative after a car accident in order to escape in an ambulance, Lucky is always thinking several steps ahead.
Those moments are clever enough to make the audience play along with her schemes.
The story has all the ingredients of an engaging thriller: betrayal, deception, loyalty, survival and revenge. But some episodes also contain moments that are simply too convenient.
There is one sequence in which Lucky gets herself into a location in a completely believable way, yet the show conveniently refuses to explain how she escapes. It feels like a deliberate omission because there is no plausible way to justify what happens next.
A moment like that is not enough to ruin the episode, or even the series, but when those narrative shortcuts start piling up, they undermine the credibility of the entire story.
Sadly, that is where my positives begin to fade and my frustrations take over. The biggest problem with Lucky is that it ultimately feels empty, a slick but strangely soulless thriller.
As good as Taylor-Joy is, the writers rely heavily on flashbacks in an attempt to manufacture emotional investment, and it never really works. Lucky herself is neither particularly interesting nor especially likable.
If you cannot root for the lead character, or at least find them compelling, it becomes difficult to stay invested through seven episodes.
The supporting cast is filled with heavyweights, including William Fichtner, Annette Bening, Clifton Collins Jr, and Timothy Olyphant, yet almost all of them are reduced to stock archetypes.
Bening seems to be sleepwalking through the role as though it were little more than a paycheque. Olyphant is given frustratingly little to do, and the always-underrated Clifton Collins Jr barely leaves an impression because he is essentially relegated to generic henchman status.
When the lead character fails to fully engage and the supporting players are given so little depth, there is simply not much left for the audience to hold onto.
Lucky also brings very little that feels fresh. The premise of a criminal trying to escape their past only to be dragged back in for one final job has been done countless times before.
In many ways, the series reminded me of Hanna (2011) mixed with the badass female energy of Kill Bill (2003), but those stories at least embraced a distinctive style and personality. Lucky rarely attempts to be anything more than a straightforward cat-and-mouse thriller, and it becomes repetitive long before its seven episodes are over.
Anya Taylor-Joy gives the performance everything she has, and the series can be genuinely suspenseful when it is operating at full speed. But its lack of emotional substance, repetitive plotting and formulaic cast of characters make it a surprisingly exhausting watch.
Even so, I cannot deny that Lucky works on a purely surface level. The villains are suitably vicious, the pursuit is often intense, and the show knows how to generate suspense. It is entertaining enough for a casual binge, but that entertainment never disguises how hollow the experience ultimately feels.
Ultimately, Lucky is quite a let-down addition to Apple TV's otherwise outstanding recent run of original series.
- Lucky
- Starring Anya Taylor-Joy, Annette Bening, Timothy Olyphant
- Created by Jonathan Tropper
- Now streaming on Apple TV
