At the start of the new comedic thriller “Big Mistakes,” the lives of Nicky Dardano (Dan Levy), a quasi-closeted pastor, and his sister Morgan (Taylor Ortega), an elementary-school teacher, are far from ideal. That’s before Morgan steals a necklace from a chintzy gift shop run by a Turkish gangster named Yusuf, who proceeds to kidnap the pair, intimidate them at gunpoint, and threaten their family, forcing them to perform an array of odd jobs to make up for the petty theft. But even under these conditions, Yusuf, who runs errands for other low-ranking thugs, senses that his new subordinates have something he doesn’t. “You two are like pieces of white bread,” he sneers. “You can get away with anything in this country.”
In fact, Nicky and Morgan’s middle-class respectability conceals an overwhelming existential paralysis. Both siblings seem to feel locked into tracks they hadn’t intended to stay on for long. Nicky leads a congregation that accepts queerness among its clergy only if they are “nonpracticing,” obliging him to keep his boyfriend (Jacob Gutierrez) a secret from his family and his church. Morgan has returned to their home town in suburban New Jersey after a failed stint as an actress in New York and fallen back into a relationship with her high-school boyfriend (Jack Innanen), a petulant bum who proposes by flinging a ring box at her as he drops her off at work. At first, Yusuf and his Russian associates keep the Dardanos (and the viewer) in the dark about what sorts of malfeasance they’re accessories to, mining the disconnect for comedy. (A typically vague instruction: “Just give him the cash and do the deal.”) With such limited tutelage, they don’t exactly become criminal masterminds—but after a while they begin to wonder what a bit of transgression could yield for them, too.
“Big Mistakes,” now streaming on Netflix, was co-created by Levy and Rachel Sennott, and it has the manic, overheated energy that’s become the actress’s signature. The New Jersey ennui and the organized-crime story lines also evoke “The Sopranos,” or a funhouse version of it with a woman and a gay man at the helm. Much of the new show’s unpredictable humor stems from this switch in perspective. When a job takes Nicky and Morgan to a near-empty strip club, it’s hard not to recall Tony’s many meetings at the Bada Bing; Nicky, for his part, takes a seat by the stage only to stare at his phone, unmoved by the half-naked dancer inches away. Yusuf’s threats—to, say, flay Nicky and burn him with acid if he doesn’t comply—tend to yield more exasperation than fear from the pastor, who tells him, “You’re being very dramatic.” It’s a small but notable subversion: in this musky, hypermasculine world (where no one is particularly bothered by Nicky’s sexuality), the straight guys are the histrionic ones. There’s more than a hint of are-men-O.K. bafflement when Morgan tries to guess what sorts of misdeeds the Russians might be up to, wondering aloud, “Why is it only ever men that get involved in this shit?”
“Big Mistakes” is Levy’s first scripted series since “Schitt’s Creek,” the gentle Canadian sitcom about a riches-to-rags family forced to downsize. Both shows feature fish-out-of-water scenarios and Levy as a tetchy gay man with a difficult sister—though Nicky has two of those, not just one. But “Big Mistakes” is a harder-edged project, closer in spirit (and volume) to “The Bear.” (The housewife-breaks-bad dramedy “Weeds” is another clear influence, as evidenced by the casting of one of that show’s leads, Elizabeth Perkins, in a small but pivotal role.) The loopy theatricality of Catherine O’Hara’s Moira, the matriarch of “Schitt’s Creek,” is replaced by the abrasive self-pity of Nicky and Morgan’s narcissistic mom, Linda (a wonderfully typecast Laurie Metcalf). The series’ opening scene plops audiences in the middle of the Dardanos’ dysfunction, as Linda, presiding over her own mother’s hospital room, screeches that her children should bear witness to their terminally ill nonna’s final days—even to her urinary incontinence. Linda rattles off all that’s on her plate, then turns to Nicky and Morgan and asks, “Could the two of you for once set your differences aside and make my mother’s death easy on me?”
