There are still three weeks left until December 25th, but Bill Murray already has his Yuletide greeting up and running. Murray’s Christmas special, titled A Very Murray Christmas, can now be streamed on Netflix.
A Very Murray Christmas, which was first announced in May, unites the comedy vet with a cavalcade of Hollywood notables. Sofia Coppola, who famously directed Murray in the 2003 film Lost in Translation, is once again behind the camera, and everyone from George Clooney to Amy Poehler to Miley Cyrus makes an appearance. If you’d like to get a taste of the special before diving into it, you can watch its trailer, which Netflix released in November.
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Murray is a living legend, but is his special worth watching? In reviewing it, several outlets have discussed it in ironic terms. “He wants a Christmas special that seems just slightly off script, familiar and recognizable yet also disturbingly wrong,” said the New York Times of Murray’s hour-long feature. Time, on the other hand, dubbed the special both “boring” and “fantastic.”
Apparently, these purposefully inconsistent descriptions fit in with Murray and Coppola’s plan. “[The special came] out of the tradition of those TV variety shows, which didn’t have a lot of logic to them,” Coppola told Time. “They were just kind of getting people together to sing holiday songs and have that Christmas motif, so we wanted to do it in that tradition, but have a little bit of a story and kind of do our version of that.”
Ultimately, A Very Murray Christmas figures to provide enough wry cheer to justify its existence. You can watch it, if you’d like. You can skip it. Alternatively, you can tell people you ran into Murray on the streets of New York, but as may have heard, no one will ever believe you.
