Big Mistakes on Netflix cannot stop being a family comedy, even under gunpoint

Dan Levy returns to television six years after Schitt’s Creek with a crime comedy in which two New Jersey siblings are blackmailed into organized crime. On Netflix from April 9, the eight-episode series is the most formally ambitious thing Levy has attempted — a genre hybrid that uses criminal pressure as the mechanism for a family reckoning the characters have been deferring for years. It is warmer than Barry, funnier than it has any right to be about the things it is actually about, and structured around a joke that only becomes visible once you stop watching the crime plot and start watching who is performing what for whom.

The joke is not about organized crime. It is about the specific American comedy of self-concept under pressure — the character who has decided who they are and has been successfully performing that identity in a world that agreed to honor the performance, suddenly in circumstances that have stopped agreeing. Nicky, played by Dan Levy, is a gay pastor in a small New Jersey town: out to his congregation but required to present as celibate, hiding a genuine relationship from both his family and his flock, delivering sermons about moral clarity from a pulpit while conducting a private life that contradicts every public position he holds. He has not constructed this identity maliciously. He has constructed it with genuine belief. The criminal world does not care. The show’s first real laugh arrives at the moment organized crime begins doing what Nicky’s family and congregation have not: demanding that the person performing all these versions of himself account for which one is true.

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His sister Morgan, played by Taylor Ortega, is doing something structurally similar but in a lower register. Where Nicky performs moral authority, Morgan performs ironic detachment — she uses the vernacular of social observation as a defensive posture against her own circumstances, narrating her situation in the language of commentary rather than living it. She is back in her hometown, re-engaged to a man she does not love, a failed actress who has substituted wit for direction. The line in the trailer that functions as the show’s proof of concept — Morgan describing her kidnapping as “fully giving kidnap homicide” — is not just a joke about Gen Z language. It is a character diagnosis. She is being held at metaphorical gunpoint by her life and is responding by reviewing the cinematography.

This is the specific comic tradition that Big Mistakes is working in, and it is one with a demanding set of precedents. The Coen Brothers spent a film career mapping the comedy of constitutive human obliviousness — the gap between what a character believes about themselves and what their situation objectively requires of them. Burn After Reading’s two gym employees with their stolen CIA disk, Fargo’s car salesman with his inept ransom scheme, are all variations on this joke. What Levy has done differently is to take the Coen template and refuse its nihilism. In the Coen version, the joke culminates in consequence: the person who did not understand the situation eventually encounters the situation’s full weight. In Big Mistakes, the family love that structures the ensemble requires that someone has to survive and possibly even learn something. That is a structural departure from the tradition, and it raises the question that the show spends eight episodes answering: can the comedy of incompetence under criminal pressure sustain warmth, or does the warmth eventually dissolve the pressure that makes the comedy work?

Barry on HBO navigated this question differently. Bill Hader’s hitman who wanted to be an actor generated comedy precisely because his desire for a different life was genuine and his situation was making it impossible. The comedy of Barry’s first two seasons worked because the audience understood both that Barry could not be redeemed and that he wanted to be — and the joke was in the sustained coexistence of those two truths. By the third season, the warmth had been almost entirely burned off by the accumulating darkness, and the show became something other than comedy while calling itself one. Big Mistakes is positioned deliberately on the warmer side of that spectrum, in the territory where Schitt’s Creek operated: a show in which the dysfunction is the pressure-test and the family is the thing being tested, not destroyed.

The casting of Laurie Metcalf as the siblings’ mother Linda is the production’s most precise structural decision. Metcalf — four-time Emmy winner, theatrical legend, comic technician of exceptional economy — plays mothers who are absolutely sincere in their love and absolutely relentless in their expression of it. Linda, as Levy has described her, is not a villain or a stereotype but a woman who has decided to run for mayor and expand her sex life at the same moment her children are being contracted into organized crime. The comedy available in this counterpoint is sophisticated: the family’s mother is advancing while her adult children are trapped, and her love for them is so thorough and so pressurizing that it constitutes its own form of entrapment. Metcalf generates this comedy not through the delivery of funny lines but through the total sincerity of a woman who is always right about the wrong things.

The production’s most interesting formal gamble is its score, composed by Peaches, the Canadian electroclash musician whose sonic world — angular, synthetic, provocative, saturated with controlled anxiety — is entirely unexpected in a family comedy set in New Jersey. Levy has said that Peaches’s music was on the writing mixtape throughout the development of the show, and that she was the only person he wanted for the score. The friction between that sonic register and the material’s emotional warmth is either the show’s sharpest formal idea or an expensive mismatch; the score signals to the audience that what they are watching is stranger and more dangerous than a family comedy has any right to be. That signal is doing structural work that the genre alone cannot do — it is maintaining the threat level in scenes that the family warmth would otherwise entirely defuse.

Rachel Sennott’s contribution to the writing requires careful accounting. Her sensibility — established in Shiva Baby, Bottoms, and I Love LA — is consistently more willing than Levy’s to let characters stay wrong, to use ironic self-awareness as both a comic mechanism and a character flaw, to build comedy around the performance of a self that the character knows is performed. Morgan is a Sennott character in a Levy show, which means she is being held simultaneously by two comic traditions that want slightly different things from her: Sennott’s tradition wants the ironic detachment to be exposed and remain unresolved; Levy’s tradition wants the family to ultimately be capable of honesty. Whether the writing room has found a way to honor both traditions or whether one eventually gives ground is the central unresolved tension that the show carries into its eight-episode run.

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The series lands inside a specific cultural moment that sharpens both its comedy and its complications. The comedy of people who believe their identity confers practical protection — who think being the kind of person they are should matter in a world that does not share their priorities — has a particular resonance in 2026 that it might not have had five years ago. The pastor whose moral authority means nothing to the criminal demanding compliance; the teacher who has retreated to a life that does not fit her, performing contentment for reasons that have nothing to do with contentment; the mother running for mayor while her children are running from gangsters. These are not political portraits. But the show is using the comedy of mismatched self-concept and actual circumstance in a moment when that specific mismatch is visible at scales considerably larger than a small New Jersey town.

Big Mistakes premieres April 9, 2026, on Netflix, with all eight episodes released simultaneously. It was created by Dan Levy and Rachel Sennott and is the first series under Levy’s overall deal with Netflix through his production company Not a Real Production Company. Levy serves as showrunner and leads the cast alongside Taylor Ortega, Laurie Metcalf, Abby Quinn, Boran Kuzum, Jack Innanen, and Elizabeth Perkins. Dean Holland directed the first two episodes; executive producers include Etan Frankel and Timothy Greenberg. Filming took place across New Jersey and Puerto Rico beginning in August 2025.

What the show is ultimately laughing at — and what the laughter keeps protecting everyone from examining — is the question of what is actually keeping these characters in place. Not organized crime. Organized crime is the external plot, the mechanism that generates the escalation. The internal reality is that Nicky was already performing an identity that did not fully contain him before anyone stole a necklace. Morgan was already retreating before the criminal world gave her somewhere to retreat toward. The show needs the crime because without it, there would be no pressure sufficient to force the family into the conversation it has been having around for years. And the laughter — warm, embarrassed, recognizing — is the sound of an audience watching people avoid a conversation they know they need to have. The comedy is the thing everyone in the room is using, characters and audience alike, to stay a few more minutes on this side of honesty.

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