Stream It Or Skip It: ‘FUBAR’ On Netflix, Where Arnold Schwarzenegger Has To Deal With Family Issues While On His Final Spy Mission

We now can add Arnold Schwarzenegger to the list of A-listers who have taken copious amount of streaming cash to star in their first TV series. But Netflix has gone all-in with Arnold, commissioning a docuseries about his life and naming him their “Chief Action Officer” in a new promo. His first project for the streamer is the action-comedy FUBAR, and it’s a fun watch.

FUBAR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: In Antwerp, a man squirts lighter fluid into a dumpster, lights it on fire and walks away.

The Gist: That man is Luke Brunner (Arnold Schwarzenegger), and with the tech assistance from his associate Barry (Milan Carter), he’s about to hop on a fire truck in order to get into the city’s Diamond District and steal some valuable stones.

Although it looks like he’s trying to sell them to an illegal diamond trader, it turns out that both Luke and Barry are CIA agents. Barry is happy that this mission is over, because he’s ready to retire. All Barry is concerned about is if he’s going to get chocolate crunchies in the ice cream cake Luke is getting for the welcome home party for his daughter Emma (Monica Barbaro).

Emma is coming home from Colombia, where she works for an NGO that’s supposed to bring clean water to areas that need it. While Luke doesn’t love her boyfriend Carter (Jay Baruchel), he does give Emma a mixer to celebrate what seems to be their inevitable marriage. When he gives her the huge box, though, she winces due to an injured shoulder.

Luke has a retirement plan: The CIA is giving him one of the boats they’ve seized, and he wants to take his ex-wife Tally (Fabiana Udenio) sailing around the world. He wants to make up for never being around, which is what led to their divorce 15 years ago.

But Barry pulls him out of his retirement party to tell him that HQ wants him to go on one more mission: He needs to go to Guyana, where the son of a crime boss he killed years earlier has now continued his father’s activities. This is despite the fact that Luke put the son, Boro (Gabriel Luna) through boarding school in the U.S. to keep him away from that life. One of their agents has infiltrated the organization but is about to be exposed and needs to be extracted. Oh, and Boro is in possession of a suitcase nuke that needs to also be removed before it gets sold to the highest bidder.

He meets Boro, who still thinks of him as the wealthy industrialist who helped his father out, and Luke soon finds out who the agent that needs to be extracted is: It’s Emma. He had no idea she was a CIA agent, and neither did Aldon (Travis Van Winkle) and Roo (Fortune Feimster), the two agents backing him up. Barry — known as “Uncle Barry” to Luke’s family — tells Luke that Emma scored incredibly high on the agency’s aptitude tests after she graduated college, and it’s been very difficult keeping the “Chinese wall” between the two for over a decade.

While Luke is upset that Emma has been putting herself in danger this whole time, Emma is angry with her father for lying to her, her brother and her mother for all these years. But they also have to focus at the mission at hand: Extract Emma and the nuke before Boro, who is ruthlessly unhinged, figures it all out.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Mix True Lies with a family-oriented action dramedy like The Good Cop (which Barbaro was also in), and you’ve got FUBAR.

Our Take: The creator and showrunner of FUBAR, Nick Santora, is probably best known for action series like Scorpion and Reacher, so he has that element of the series down well. But what we were surprised about is just how funny the first episode was, with Schwarzenegger being one of the funniest parts of that episode.

We know that Arnold is completely capable of pulling off this kind of comedic action series, because he’s done it many times on the big screen. But what surprised us a little bit is that the family element of the show is what really dominates, even over the action.

The twist that both Luke and Emma have both been in the CIA and neither knew about the other makes for some real family dynamics, mainly because Emma now knows that the fact that he was a businessman trying to hustle — he and Barry supposedly owned a gym — wasn’t the reason why he was gone all the time. She knows that he could have settled into an analyst job that kept him close to home, but he chose not to.

Barbaro more than holds her own with Arnold, both in the action and the comedy departments, and there is definite father-daughter chemistry there. And Carter, Van Winkle and Feimster provide some funny support as Luke’s CIA colleagues. But we’re also happy to see Arnold doing what he does best, even if he’s a little older and a little less pumped up (though still in damn good shape for a 75-year-old) than we’re used to seeing him.

Some quibbles: We don’t know much about Luke’s son Oscar (Devon Bostick) other than that he and his family are living over Tally’s garage and that he comes up with lame app ideas. Speaking of Tally, we hope that Udenio gets more of a chance to show how her character was affected by Luke’s career.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: Luke and Emma are waiting at the pickup point, but Boro finds them instead.

Sleeper Star: Gabriel Luna plays Boro with just the right mix of sane and insane, especially when he confronts a previously trusted team member whom he thinks has been stealing money from him.

Most Pilot-y Line: “For what it’s worth, Donnie’s snowman mug sucked!” Barry tells Luke after he saw Tally and a guy from her office getting cozy at Color Me Mine.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Between Arnold’s funny lines, the fun supporting cast and the well-thought-out family dynamic, FUBAR delivers a fun first episode that moves quickly and keeps you on the edge of your seat.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.