Arnold Schwarzenegger spent decades promising he’d be back. In FUBAR, Netflix finally took him up on it, handing him his first leading role in a scripted live-action television series. The show premiered on May 25, 2023, was renewed that June, returned for a second season on June 12, 2025, and was canceled that August. Two seasons, 16 episodes, one long goodbye.
The premise is a sitcom engine bolted to a spy thriller. Luke Brunner and his daughter Emma have lied to each other for years, each secretly working for the CIA. When both learn the truth, they discover they don’t actually know each other at all. Their superiors force them to work together on dangerous operations, and the friction is exactly what you’d expect: Luke treats Emma like a child, hovers over her safety, and muddles her relationships.
Trailer, via Skydance.
Arnold Schwarzenegger as Luke Brunner
The casting is the whole pitch, and it’s also the whole problem. Schwarzenegger plays Luke as a man who has spent his life being the most dangerous person in any room and has no idea how to be a father. That’s a real idea. It’s also an idea the show states out loud, repeatedly, rather than dramatizing.
Monica Barbaro plays Emma, and she’s the best thing here. She gets the harder job — being the competent one while her father second-guesses every move — and she plays it straight while everyone around her goes broad.
The supporting cast is a deep bench of comic performers.
- Milan Carter as Barry Putt
- Fortune Feimster as Ruth “Roo” Russel
- Travis Van Winkle as Aldon Reese
- Fabiana Udenio as Tally Brunner
- Aparna Brielle as Tina Mukerji
- Jay Baruchel as Carter Perlmutter
- Guy Burnet as Theodore Chips
- Carrie-Anne Moss as Greta Nelso
That’s a lot of names for a show that rarely gives any of them a scene worth the hire.
A premise that runs out of road by episode four
The father-daughter spy hook is a good one. It’s clean, it’s funny on paper, and it generates conflict without anyone having to be stupid. The trouble is that FUBAR burns through it fast.
Once Luke and Emma know each other’s secret, the show has to keep manufacturing reasons for them to lie again, hide again, and relearn the same lesson. The premise is a pilot, not a series. Sixteen episodes is a long time to watch two people have the same argument in different countries.
Nick Santora created the show, and he knows how to build a procedural. The missions move. The banter lands often enough. But the emotional arc never advances past the pilot’s final scene, and by season two you can feel the writers circling.
What the show actually gets right
The action is better than it needs to be. FUBAR is produced by Skydance Television and Blackjack Films, and the money is on screen — the set pieces have scale, the locations have texture, and Schwarzenegger still moves like a man who knows where the camera is.
The comedy is broader than the premise wants. Feimster and Baruchel are funny people, and the show lets them be funny, but the tone keeps sliding between spy-thriller stakes and network-sitcom beats. A tense confrontation will end and the next scene will undercut it with a gag.
That whiplash isn’t a bug in the genre — it’s the genre. But FUBAR never decides how seriously it wants to take itself, so the audience never knows how seriously to take it.
The published critical score
FUBAR holds a published critical score of 4.8/10, with a Metacritic score of 48/100. That number is not a mystery. It reflects a show with a strong star, a strong hook, and no plan for what comes after.
Here’s what the score is really measuring:
- A first leading television role for Schwarzenegger that the material never fully uses
- A father-daughter premise that resolves itself in the pilot
- A supporting cast of comedians given little to do
- Action sequences that outclass the writing around them
- Two seasons that never build toward anything
None of those are fatal on their own. Together they describe a show that is watchable and forgettable in equal measure.
The Brunner family problem
The show’s central relationship is supposed to be the reason to watch. Luke and Emma are estranged by secrecy, then forced together, then forced to trust each other. That’s a real arc, and Barbaro plays the daughter’s side of it with more patience than the script earns.
But Luke’s arc is thinner. He’s overprotective, he’s dismissive, he learns a lesson, he forgets it. The show keeps telling us he’s changed without showing the change. Schwarzenegger is charming enough to paper over a lot of that, and he is genuinely good at the deadpan stuff. He is not given a scene that asks him to do anything he hasn’t done before.
When a father and daughter discover they both secretly work for the CIA, their high-stakes missions get tangled up with awkward family dynamics.
That’s the official synopsis, and it’s also the entire show. Everything FUBAR does, it does inside that sentence.
Where the second season goes
The second season premiered on June 12, 2025, and by then the show had settled into a rhythm that worked well enough to keep going and not well enough to grow. The missions got bigger. The family stuff stayed the same size.
Netflix canceled FUBAR in August 2025, after two seasons. That’s a normal outcome for a show with this profile — not a hit, not a flop, a title that fills a slot and then doesn’t. The streamer has canceled better shows faster, and it has renewed worse ones for longer.
The cancellation isn’t the story. The story is that FUBAR had a movie star, a clean premise, and a real shot at being the kind of show people watch together, and it spent two seasons refusing to become one.
What FUBAR leaves behind
There’s a version of this show that works. It’s smaller, it’s funnier, it lets Barbaro carry more of it, and it treats the father-daughter relationship as the actual mission rather than the wrapper around it. FUBAR gestures at that version constantly without committing to it.
What’s left is a show that’s easy to start and easy to abandon. The action is competent. The cast is likable. The premise is smart. The execution is a shrug.
That’s what a 4.8/10 looks like. Not a disaster — a missed opportunity with a famous name attached, which is somehow harder to forgive.
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