If you ask the psychologists, they'll tell you that humor is a defense mechanism, a buffer between ourselves and the painfulness of reality. I'm not sure that's actually true — I think of laughter as something transcendent — but I have to admit that the world has gotten so alarming that I'd rather watch something funny than the news.
I laughed a whole lot watching Big Mistakes, a new half-hour Netflix crime comedy from Dan Levy, of Schitt's Creek fame, who co-created the series with Rachel Sennott. Set in a fictional New Jersey city, this story about an offbeat family that finds itself entangled with the mob is a wild and woolly inversion of Schitt's Creek. Where that much-adored show started out cartoonish and grew warmer and more humane, Big Mistakes starts as a frolic then morphs into a farce that grows more than a little hellish.
Laurie Metcalf stars as Linda, a histrionic single mother of three who's running for mayor with guidance from her favorite child, Natalie (Abby Quinn), who has the smug, small-souled efficiency of a political operative. She clings to her mother's side like a barnacle.
Things are more fraught with Linda's other kids. Levy plays Nicky, an anxious gay minister who has to hide his boyfriend from his parishioners. Nicky is forever bickering with his sister, Morgan (Taylor Ortega), a chaos-inducing school teacher. She's got a puppyish boyfriend she doesn't adore.
When Linda orders Nicky and Morgan to get some jewelry for their dying grandmother, they commit a small, foolish crime that, crazily, leaves them beholden to mobsters. Even as they try to deal with everyday life — their grandmother's funeral, their mother's campaign, Sunday sermons — they are forced to do laughably dodgy missions that take them from strip clubs and cattle auctions to prisons and private jets. While all this has Nicky positively hissing with panic, Morgan digs the excitement, even growing attracted to a Turkish crook, played by Boran Kuzum, whose presence may make you think of the film Anora.
Now, it's hardly groundbreaking for a comedy to throw ordinary people into the shark-infested waters of crime. Yet, what matters in pop culture is less originality than verve and commitment. Although Big Mistakes isn't about much of anything — and the gangster plot is wantonly implausible — it revels in its amusingly awkward situations and clever, kvetchy dialogue. Big Mistakes makes being frantic funny in a way that another new show, The Audacity, does not.
Levy gives his all as Nicky, whose body language betrays emotional blockage but whose face is a menagerie of stressed out tics and grimaces. A sincere man of God — the show respects religious faith — he's a good, orderly person who's easily driven crazy by those who aren't orderly or good. This means he's perfectly paired with Morgan. She's the sort of shoot-from-the-hip troublemaker I usually find annoying, but here, in a career-making performance, Ortega gives their scenes a real zing. Her run-amok charm plays perfectly off Levy's tension — they drive each other bats as only family can.
In a way, each embodies a side of their mother. It's another memorable role for Metcalf, an astonishingly gifted comedian whose wildly expressive face can, in a micro-second, go from a comedy mask to a tragedy mask and back again. Her Linda is the show's best character, a self-made woman who's at once principled, hard-working, sexually open and not a little loopy. She rides on emotional extremes, but we like her because she's savvy enough to know it.
Like other comedic crime shows such as The Lowdown and How to Get to Heaven from Belfast, this eight-part show is best when not focusing on its underworld plot. The reason to watch is the byplay between the family members, who bubble with yakkety dysfunction, and the moments when the hijinks veer into delirium. I think you'll enjoy the late-night visit to the cemetery and Linda wearing the ugliest face paint of all time, but I'm not so sure about how you'll feel about the Rocky Mountain Oysters.
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