Murderbot is nearly here—the first two episodes arrive May 16 on Apple TV+—but series writers, directors, and producers Chris and Paul Weitz are already thinking about what comes next.
The sci-fi series stars Alexander Skarsgård as a security unit that hacks itself to gain free will, but still ends up sticking with the humans (who both disgust and fascinate it) that it’s been tasked with protecting.
It’s a character fans of Martha Wells‘ Murderbot Diaries have come to know and love since her 2017 novella All Systems Red—a Hugo- and Nebula-winning smash that has spawned six follow-ups so far, including 2020 full-length novel Network Effect, as well as a few adjacent short stories.
In other words, there’s a lot more material for Murderbot, which pulls only from All Systems Red, if the Apple TV+ series finds an eager audience.
“We would love to adapt more of them,” Paul Weitz told io9 in a recent interview ahead of Murderbot‘s premiere. “[We would] make sure that Martha liked what we were thinking, for sure. We love that there’s a real ending to the first season, but also the ending is the beginning of something Murderbot [as a character].”
“If people like the first season, there’ll be a desire to see Murderbot reunited in some fashion with the [other characters it meets],” Chris Weitz added. “I think that that would be something that we’d really want to look at in terms of figuring out what a second season would look like.”
Murderbot arrives May 16 on Apple TV+.
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