(courtesy IMP Awards)
You have to feel sorry for Dan Levy.
Not because anything terrible has happened to him; rather, because of the crushing weight of expectation placed upon the immensely talented creator, writer and one of the superb ensemble cast of the legendarily funny Schitt’s Creek from people waiting to see what his next epic sitcom hit will be.
And yes, when you’ve gone as big as a viral phenom like Schitt’s Creek, the expectation is that it will be epic and huge and as adorably funny as its predecessor.
It’s a metaphorical pop culture albatross around Levy’s neck, and while there’s no doubt he possesses an endless font of creative brio, Big Mistakes, relatively newly released on Netflix, doesn’t quite shift the weighty dead seabird off its creator’s weighed down shoulders.
The concept is pretty fun though; well, if you can call being roped in to do the bidding of local organised crime figures entirely against your will fun in any way, shape or form.
Which gay pastor, Nicky Morelli (Dan Levy) most assuredly does not.
He is horrified when it emerges that his problematic sister Morgan (Taylor Ortega) has lifted a diamond necklace from a local gift store – it’s on a trashy strip mall so she, rather wrongly, assumes it’s a piece of costume jewellery – which it emerges, rather violently as it turns out, was intended for a highly valued someone in the organised crime network, someone who doesn’t take kindly to have their very valuable good stolen.
So, just return it and walk away, right? Haha not quite so simple – the local errand Turkish guy for the Russian gangsters, Yusuf (Boran Kuzum) demands that not only must they get it back, and fast, but they must then do a considerable amount of penance to make up for their egregious act.
Complicating things, and this has a slapstick element of a sort to proceedings, is that the necklace is around the neck of Nicky and Morgan’s just-deceased grandmother who now lies buried in the local cemetery of Glenview, New Jersey.
Cue much hilarity! Well, kind of; what cuts through much more noticeably is that Nicky and Morgan don’t really get along anymore and it’s their prickly relationship that sets the template for many of the relationship in Big Mistakes.
By and large, the characters in the eight-episode first season of the show are not particularly nice people and that works against the flow and humour of the show in certain key ways.
You accept that many sitcoms feature dysfunctional characters because there is comedy gold in them thar flawed examples of humanity and half the fun of a good sitcom is watching how these impaired people navigate heightened situations and the one underpinning Big Mistakes is as heightened as they get.
As far as that goes, Big Mistakes excels in serving up people who both know and don’t know better and who are often trumped by the more fractured parts of their psyche but who somehow, and its damn near miraculous, emerge unscathed from the mess they have wandered into (this particularly applies to Nicky and Morgan who survive a climactic scene they should’ve gone under in; no spoilers but it’s less funny than intensely damning of the judgment they have displayed, even for the best of intentions, up to this point).
But as the final jaw-dropping reveal makes clear, and it’s the first time that anyone in the show has faced any real consequences for their actions – somewhat miraculous given the compounding errors of judgment at work here – you can duck and weave for so long before the mess you have created swallows you whole.
Big Mistakes isn’t quite as funny as I think it wants to be, and there are times when the admittedly sharp writing is more cringy dark than anything approaching laugh out loud funny, and the characters simply grate in a way that makes you wonder if you want to keep watching.
But just as you think you’re done with yet another argumentative interlude with Nicky and Morgan, or you wonder how anyone wants either Nicky’s mum Linda (Laurie Metcalf who is absolutely superb in every way, stealing scenes with dialogue-chomping alacrity) or smug, controlling sister Natalie (Abby Quinn) in their lives, the characters really let loose with some searing personal confession or serve up complete and utter comedy gold and you realise that the show is worth sticking it out for.
It’s not uncommon for shows to fail to completely mail in their debut seasons and despite the expectation on Levy, there’s no reason why he should be exempt from this dynamic.
What makes Big Mistakes worth watching is that though it doesn’t deliver a lot of emotional substance or any form of incisive social commentary like other shows somewhat in its genre like Weeds or Breaking Bad (and yes, yes, this is not a comedy, we get that) until fairly late in its eight episode run, it does get there and it’s weighty enough to merit turning up for season two.
One thing the show is going to need to watch is that for much of its first season, it doesn’t deliver a tremendous amount of hard-hitting emotion or even glancing bonding moments until late in the piece, and while this makes some narrative sense, given what transpires in the building episodes, a little bit more substance earlier on would possibly have served it well.
Still, Big Mistakes still gets there in the end, and while it’s not up there with the best series that have dropped this year, its funny and emotionally meaningful enough and has gathered up enough of a narrative head of the steam that by the time episode eight does its cleverly revelatory thing, replete with consequences for every member of the Morelli clan, you are there for it and ready where all these reasonably funny flawed people, all of them in way over their heads, will take us next.
Big Mistakes streams on Netflix.