“What if we told a story that was just as funny as it is thrilling?”
That was the question Dan Levy posed to himself early in the process of making Big Mistakes, the new Netflix comedy he created alongside Rachel Sennott. Starring Levy and Taylor Ortega as a brother and sister who stumble into the world of organized crime, Big Mistakes is, yes, another family story from the co-creator of Schitt’s Creek; it has even got another legendary actress — this time Laurie Metcalf instead of the late, legendary Catherine O’Hara — playing Levy’s onscreen mom.
But while Schitt’s Creek embraced coziness and heart, Big Mistakes leans in hard on anxiety and chaos — whether it’s Levy and Ortega’s wayward siblings trying to negotiate with a Turkish crime boss or Metcalf stumbling through a debate as a mayoral candidate. Big Mistakes confidently jumps between tense drama and precise, character-driven comedy, a tonal mix that Levy says “felt really exciting to me. And then we embarked on the process of figuring out, OK, well, what does that look like and how do we do it?”
Big Mistakes is not the only comedy this year to combine crimes and misdemeanors; I’ll have more to come on its brethren, from cozy murder mysteries to spy sagas to riotous tales of money-laundering schemes. However, talking to Levy gave me a lot of insight into why it’s so irresistible to wring laughs from the darkest parts of human behavior — and why it is so challenging to get it right.
As an experienced comedy writer, Levy, for example, had to bring in plenty of support to get the show’s actual criminal mechanics in place.
“We hired some drama writers who had experience in breaking crime to come in with fresh eyes and say, ‘Okay, here’s where I think we could go, or here’s how we can plot it out,’” he tells me. “Once those pieces came into place, I think we had the whole season within a week and a half.”
The details of the crimes at the center of Big Mistakes almost don’t matter. Late in the season, Levy’s character, a New Jersey pastor named Nicky, becomes exasperated with the gangsters ordering him around. “Why is there this kabuki theater around just telling us what’s going on?” he asks Ortega’s Morgan. A lot of the comedy of Big Mistakes comes from how eager Nicky is to get disentangled from this criminal enterprise, while Morgan embraces the chaos.
“The further she gets and the more purpose she finds through it, it’s almost like the less she thinks about the details,” Ortega, a breakout on the show, tells me. “She’s not going to find this anywhere else in her life at that moment and doesn’t really know how to get it for herself.”
Though the main plot engine of Big Mistakes is Nicky and Morgan’s criminal misadventures, as they’re recruited to run errands for the local mob and eventually get caught up in a gangland war, there’s a surprisingly traditional sitcom spine underneath it, with A plots and B plots and smaller comedic setpieces. Metcalf’s Linda is running for mayor with the help of her eldest daughter, Natalie (Abby Quinn), while Nicky and Morgan are juggling romantic relationships in various states of disrepair. It’s another way that Big Mistakes echoes Schitt’s Creek — it is, in the end, a family comedy.
“The show is about what we inherit from our family,” says Levy, who won Emmys for writing, directing, producing and acting on Schitt’s Creek, the comedy he created with his father, Eugene Levy. “I happen to come from a family that expresses love, expresses panic, expresses anxiety in heated conversations. And I really wanted to set the table for the audience that this is who this family is, and this is who these two characters are by way of this family tree.”
Ortega, as it happens, also comes from “a family of yellers,” in Levy’s words — she’s even from New Jersey, where Big Mistakes is set. So when it came to scenes like the one that opens the series, when the entire family is gathered at their grandmother’s deathbed and can’t keep from shouting at each other, Ortega felt like she had a perfect grasp of these people and the tone Big Mistakes was going to set.
“I was at a family event recently, and my sister’s boyfriend came up to my dad and went, ‘I know that you guys are having a normal conversation, but from across the room, it looks like you’re fighting at the party,’” Ortega says. “It’s been funny seeing the reaction to the show, because I totally understand people who can’t handle it. But everyone’s loud in my family and everyone talks at the absolute 10 of everything.”
Crime 101
Getting an audience to embrace a family of yellers is one challenge; keeping them on board, and laughing, as people are threatened, blackmailed and killed, is an entirely different one. Levy says that he, Sennott and their writers’ room tried not to think too much about audience comfort while making Big Mistakes, particularly when it came to the characters.
“Making people likable, I think, is the biggest mistake you can make writing television,” says Levy, while acknowledging he still gets plenty of studio notes to make them “likable” anyway. “You’ve got to create a separation between the audience and the characters. Otherwise, I don’t think it will challenge the audience to care.”
But when it comes to the higher-stakes parts of the show, Levy knew that the audience had to feel comfortable enough to know they were still allowed to laugh. Take the scenes in episode 2, when Morgan and Nicky have been forced into a van by the gangster Yusuf (Boran Kuzum), but still find time to squabble with each other and eventually with Yusuf as well. Ortega says those scenes were originally written just for her audition, but were eventually worked into the show as the ideal example of Morgan and Nicky’s squabbling, codependent relationship.
“Writing a scene, it’s important to always remember to remind the audience that they are safe,” Levy explains. “Again, paralleling Schitt’s Creek, we had moments of real sentimentality on that show. But it would always end with a joke because it was important to keep reminding the audience that, at its core, it is still meant to make you laugh.”
That sense of audience comfort, no matter what chaos is unfolding onscreen, is essential in every other dark crime comedy on TV right now, no matter how distinct the stories they’re telling. Hulu’s Only Murders in the Building has managed to pull it off for five seasons, building entire stories around murders (and sometimes even more crimes!) while maintaining a tone as cozy as Selena Gomez’s coats. Netflix’s A Man on the Inside is an even more comfortable mix, with its second season finding Ted Danson’s private detective on the case of a stolen laptop at a small college, unraveling (of course!) a larger conspiracy in the process.
There’s even darker stuff afoot on Peacock’s Ponies, which, as showrunners Susanna Fogel and David Iserson told me earlier this week, was specifically built so that it could look like a 1970s CIA spy thriller but secretly be a fun hang with its young female protagonists, played by Haley Lu Richardson and Emilia Clarke. As Iserson put it to me, “We set out to make something that was able to exist exactly in the tone that we wanted, to have complicated emotional moments and have comedy and have drama and all these things.” FX’s The Lowdown similarly finds its own spin on the tried-and-true detective genre, putting Ethan Hawke’s amateur gumshoe on the case of a suspicious death that unravels big-business conspiracies, white nationalism, Native American history and political chicanery in the process.
The frantic, blood-spattered energy of Big Mistakes has its own smaller cohort of kindred spirits, including another show created by Rachel Sennott, I Love LA. That HBO series is not specifically about crime, following the exploits of a group of friends in their late 20s, but it does handle one brief criminal enterprise — Odessa A’zion’s Tallulah brazenly stealing someone’s Balenciaga purse — with the same mix of blasé youthful foolishness and chaos that makes Big Mistakes so appealing.
And though I won’t spoil much about the second season of Deli Boys, launching on Hulu at the end of May, it’s back with its laugh-a-minute comic pace, which could be interrupted by gunfire or a booby trap at any moment. A character who can make you laugh while threatening someone with a gun is truly one you will never forget.
Or as Levy says, “There is a safety in being reminded of what you’re there to watch.”
