As if to leave no doubt who we're looking at behind the grizzled beard and worn features, our first glimpse of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the action comedy "FUBAR," his first-ever scripted live-action television series, shows him smoking a big cigar. Perhaps he had it written into his contract, and possibly the production budget. It won't be the last one he smokes.
Created by Nick Santora, whose 2014 series "Scorpion" is a less comical cousin of the current entry, and premiering this week on Netflix, the series takes its title from old acronymic army slang for (to put it politely) "Fouled Up Beyond all Repair/Recognition," and not, as one might think, "Feeling Unmoved by Another Retread." Ripping a page from the execrable Schwarzenegger feature "True Lies," recently rebooted into a not racist, not sexist television series, it stars the former governor of California as Luke Brunner, a CIA agent whose family assumes him to be an ordinary businessman — with the added twist that daughter Emma (Monica Barbaro) is also secretly a CIA agent.
Luke is looking forward to retirement. (Schwarzenegger, 75, is playing 65.) He has bought a boat, which he insists on calling a ship (it's a boat), in hopes that he can get his ex-wife, Tally (Fabiana Udenio), to sail away with him. Tally, meanwhile, has been seeing Donnie (Andy Buckley), a man who is so obviously no competition he might as well not exist at all, except to give Luke something to obsess over and other characters another thing to mock. There is much mocking, and obsessing, among them.
