'Big Mistakes' drags Dan Levy into organized crime

by Glen Weldon

Big Mistakes, the new Netflix comedy co-created by Dan Levy (Schitt’s Creek) and Rachel Sennott (I Love LA), opens with Laurie Metcalf yelling at a dying old lady. Episode one, scene one. It’s the proverbial jump, and Laurie Metcalf is already screaming her fool head off.

“Welp,” this critic wrote in his notebook, “I’m in.”

It may help to know that the tank in which I have long found myself, when it comes to the great Laurie Metcalf portraying a woman feeling her feelings, is miles wide and fathoms deep.

When we meet her, Metcalf’s character Linda is tending to her dying mother, whom she’s convinced is hard of hearing, despite the poor woman’s repeated insistence that she’s not. Linda is in take-charge mode, lovingly(?) hectoring two of her offspring, Nicky (Levy) and Morgan (Taylor Ortega) while heaping praise on her perfect golden child daughter Natalie (Abby Quinn).

In the handful of seconds it takes for this scene to unspool, years of family history reveal themselves in murmured asides and silent glares and frustrated grunts. We quickly learn that Linda is running for mayor of her tiny New Jersey town, and she’s worried about her chances. We learn that she’s disappointed in both Nicky and Morgan, albeit for very different reasons, and that she’s the kind of woman who manages to convince herself that her family is happy and perfect, despite decades of evidence to the contrary.

Nicky, for example, is an uptight pastor who feels compelled to hide his boyfriend (Jacob Gutierrez) from his congregation. Morgan tried to make a go of it as an actor in New York before fizzling out and retreating to her hometown, where she joylessly toils as an elementary school teacher while getting lovebombed by her pathetic lovesick puppy of a high school boyfriend (Jack Innanen).

Nicky and Morgan are wildly unhappy, so when an improbable set of circumstances drags them into the world of organized crime, you’ll be forgiven for wondering if they’re not better off. That’s the sandbox that Big Mistakes sets out to play in, and it works, mostly.

Co-creators Levy and Sennott have made a risky calculation, however. They’re betting that viewers will find the characters of Nicky and Morgan, who bicker ceaselessly throughout the season, caustically funny and recognizably fallible.

And there’s certainly precedent — Levy’s previous extended tenure as creator/star was on Schitt’s Creek, where he also played the uptight queer brother to an irresponsible party-girl sister with whom he frequently clashed. But between Schitt’s Creek’s first and second seasons, the writers strove to sand down its characters’ edges. From then on, David and Alexis Rose might argue, but they always had each other’s backs. It became a TV relationship that you knew could only ever end in a hug.

Not so Nicky and Morgan. Big Mistakes establishes that there is real gulf stretching between the two characters, one filled with resentment and long-nurtured grudges. I was grateful for that, because it meant that the show was forced to honor it and repeatedly account for it — decades of bitterness couldn’t get waved away by a single act of kindness here or a thoughtful word there, a la Schitt’s Creek, because that’s not how families work. (Later in the season, that yawning gulf does get bridged, but it does so only with the aid of illicit substances, in a hilariously artificial and fleeting way.)

As a result, whenever Nicky and Morgan find themselves in extreme circumstances — which, given the show’s crime-centered narrative, is relatively often — their bickering grows venal, spiteful, petty and mean. Me, I find that funny. But I suspect fans looking to this show for some echoes of Schitt’s Creek’s doggedly determined warmth and cuddlesomeness will be left cold, possibly even angry.

(The black-hearted villains among you might wonder if, perhaps, Levy witnessed the fandom that metastasized around Schitt’s Creek, which became so much larger than the show he made — remember all that squeeing over Patrick and David? — and thought to himself: Yeah, not that. Let’s make sure not to do that again.) (No? Just me?)

While we’re busting out perfectly unfair comparisons to Schitt’s Creek, let’s close with a biggie. The Laurie Metcalf aspect.

There is a tendency, if you’ve been watching her for decades, to see that Laurie Metcalf’s in a given project and think to yourself, “Well, I mean, it’s Laurie Metcalf. Just wind her up and let her go, and whatever happens will be fun to watch.”

And while that’s true to a certain extent, Metcalf is an actor like any other. She needs to be written for.

I’d argue that what Levy, Sennott and their team of writers are doing for Metcalf on this show is akin to what Levy and co. did for Catherine O’Hara on Schitt’s Creek: They know the actor, they know what she’s capable of delivering, and they’re writing to that capability by giving her the room she needs to absolutely kill it.

In the case of Linda, they give her an outer hardness to play, which is very funny. But they also outfit her with something she desperately wants — to become the mayor — and throw countless circumstances at her to frustrate that want. And while that’s all played for laughs, they also take pains to ground it with a brief, late-season monologue about why she’s seeking an elected office, which only makes it resonate even more.

Metcalf’s already earned four golden Emmy statuettes; she doesn’t need yet another. But that doesn’t change the fact that the work she’s putting in on every episode of Big Mistakes is pure comedy gold.