In only a handful of prominent roles, Dan Levy has developed a set of gestures so distinct you could recognize them at a thousand yards. One in particular involves tilting his head sideways and hunching up his shoulders, as if he is flinching at life. In Big Mistakes, his first new sitcom since the end of Schitt’s Creek, which he created and starred in with his father, Eugene Levy, his Nicky Dardano has a lot to flinch from. For one thing, he’s a pastor in a denomination that requires gay men to stay celibate, so even though he’s been sleeping with the church handyman (Jacob Gutierrez) for a year, he’s perennially anxious they’re going to get found out. For another, there’s his family, whose internet dynamics are a bottomless pool of discomfort. The Netflix series, which Levy created with I Love LA’s Rachel Sennott, opens midfrenzy, with his dying nonna screaming from a hospital bed and his mother, Linda (Laurie Metcalf), only adding to the din. Although Nicky and his sisters, Morgan (Taylor Ortega) and Natalie (Abby Quinn), are all in their 30s, their lives show no signs of settling down, and neither does the show, whose eight episodes hurtle forward with ceaseless velocity and end so abruptly it’s as if you’ve smashed into a wall.
Stability is there for the taking: Nicky’s boyfriend is obviously ready to get serious—he keeps asking when the two of them can finally book a cruise—and Morgan’s boyfriend, Max (Jack Innanen), whom she’s known since they were kids, is almost pitifully prepared to propose. But the lives they’ve chosen don’t really fit them, much as they might wish otherwise. Morgan, who took a whirl at being an actress in New York until the money ran out, now works as a kindergarten teacher, and Nicky seems to genuinely love tending to his flock. But whether mess finds them or they seek it out, they can’t stay out of trouble—and perhaps don’t entirely want to.
Chaos, in this case, comes in the form of Yusuf (Boran Kuzum), who runs a store selling cheap trinkets. Morgan settles on a necklace, a replacement for a long-lost one their grandmother abruptly calls out for, but Yusuf rudely refuses to sell it to her, and Morgan takes such offense that she shoplifts it while Nicky is buying a pair of Virgin Mary figurines. (Yusuf, who does not keep a close eye on his own stock, thinks they’re Elsa from Frozen.) The necklace turns out to be both far more valuable than its sticker price and not Yusuf’s to sell, connected, in ways the show isn’t especially interested in explaining, to a semiorganized crime ring run by a Russian thug named Ivan (Mark Ivanir). That night, Yusuf bangs on the door of Nicky’s rectory, demanding the necklace’s return and insisting that Morgan and Nicky make up for the inconvenience by running a few errands for their drug-smuggling new friends.
Big Mistakes’ setup is fertile territory for a fish-out-of-water comedy, one that doesn’t require you to take its premise particularly seriously. And the episodes are full of acid-tipped zingers, like when Linda assures Nicky that he’s every bit her child despite being adopted: “I birthed you emotionally, which is just as painful.” Metcalf is a sitcom legend and a Broadway powerhouse, and she gets to use both skills at once here, as a battle-ax single mom who decides to compensate for the disorder of her mother’s death by launching a campaign for mayor. Although Levy and Sennott originally conceived of the series with themselves in the lead as siblings, you’d never know it from the crackling rapport between Levy and Ortega, who launch barbs at each other as if they’ve been doing it their entire lives. When Nicky says something that makes Morgan cringe, she replies, “What are you, addicted to humiliation?”
The trouble is that the show’s gritty, single-camera style doesn’t really mesh with the contrivances of its plot; it’s as if they were making Schitt’s Creek but shooting it like Anora. Several episodes are built around the premise of Yusuf sending the siblings to carry out some illicit task without explaining what they’re meant to be doing, which makes for fruitful comedic misunderstandings but stretches the bounds of plausibility, especially when it happens more than once. (Surely, the second time around, he’d furnish a few specifics, if only for the sake of expediency.) Nicky wrestles with the conflict between his sexuality and his job, but we’re never given any hint of why he was drawn to the ministry in the first place, especially knowing that it would force him to be professionally closeted.
Big Mistakes is agreeably energetic, and its first season goes by at a bingeable clip. But its frantic back-and-forth amounts to little in the end, a meal that goes down so fast it’s hard to remember what you just ate. It’s fun to watch these characters bounce off one another, but I’d be fine if I never saw them again.