It is always going to be risky when you launch a new TV show and call it Big Mistakes (streaming now on Netflix). If you are Dan Levy, however, how else do you follow Schitt’s Creek? After sweeping every Emmy, one thing you get to do is call your next series what ever you want.
He could have called it Risk. That is what it is when you attempt to follow a big, defining hit. Big Mistakes, however, is not just another Schitt’s show. This is Levy busting loose from what came before.
He is the co-creator along with writer/actress/comedienne Rachel Sennott, who portrayed Saturday Night Live pioneer Rosie Shuster in the Jason Reitman feature “Saturday Night.” If Schitt’s Creek was a comedy showcase for Levy’s dad Eugene, the late, great Catherine O’Hara and others, Big Mistakes is a much more bracing experience. The wake up call comes early with the simple, indie film-ish titles and the skreechy opening theme.
Shot in New Jersey, the series features Levy as an openly gay pastor named Nicky who gets blackmailed into becoming a criminal accomplice. He’s teamed on this unwanted side hustle by his sister Morgan played by Taylor Ortega (Welcome to Flatch). Morgan is a supremely unpleasant nightmare, a role originally set to be played by co-creator Sennott before her other series, I Love LA, was picked up by HBO.
As public schoolteacher Morgan, Ortega succeeds in behaving like the monster child in a highly dysfunctional family. How this child became so messed up is answered as we meet her mother Linda, played to the raw nerves hilt by Laurie Metcalf (The Conners). Linda runs the family hardware store and is about to take a run at a political career with the help of her torturously efficient daughter Natalie (Abby Quinn).
The toxic family dynamic is all designed to grind pastor Nicky into a lump of anxiety ash — the plan all along as Levy told interviewer Tom Power on CBC Radio’s q. Already a mess trying to keep his boyfriend a secret from his otherwise liberal congregation (and a nosy secretary), the pastor gets dragged into hell when he and his awful sister try to buy some costume jewelry for a dying grandmother at a cheesy convenience store. Morgan winds up stealing a necklace, Big Mistake No. 1 as the rude criminal who runs the shop (Boran Kuzum) tracks down the siblings. The Turkish hitman (don’t call him Russian) demands the necklace. Big problem: it is buried along with the grandmother.
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Tensions get racheted up. Morgan and and Nicky have to dig the old lady up. Necklace is returned to the shop goon, but things only escalate from there. The siblings, carping all the way in the back of a non-descript van, are driven to the estate of Mr. Big. The crime boss is happy to have his very valuable stolen jewels back, but the kids now find themselves just a flip phone call away from fetching and delivering his latest criminal enterprises.
Three episodes in, it is not just Nicky who is feeling anxious. Viewers will have had enough with the brother and sister bickering. Things get very funny, however, in Episode Four — written by Erin Levy, Dan’s sister — when the kids have to bring a criminal just sprung from the slammer over to mom’s house for dinner. The man devours the meal and then helps himself to dessert, which is mom Linda, upstairs and loud. It is a festival of awkwardness. Hilarity ensues.
Does Big Mistakes work as One Mistake After Another? The challenge of course is stringing this out over another eight-episode season or three. The mom for mayor storyline does seem like from another show, although more Metcalf is always welcome. Levy continues to suprise as an actor/writer with range, including the romantic storyline. As showrunner he and fellow executive producer/director Dean Holland (The Office) would be wise, however, to land on a tone, even a blended one — a challenge to do when you are trying to be different in a world where short seasons are the new norm.
It can be done, however. Go back and look — it took Schitt’s Creek a season to rise.
The blueprint for me would be Barry, a series where Bill Hader mastered the high art of creating a dark comedy-crime series. The church setting and all these characters seem to open up plenty of possibilities. Levy deserves a shot at making the right amount of Mistakes.
