‘Big Mistakes’ Review: Dan Levy’s Sloppy Netflix Series Can’t Overcome Its Own Unforced Errors

A reverend and a public school teacher walk into a gift shop and steal a necklace. This isn’t the set-up for a joke; it’s the inciting incident in “Big Mistakes,” a Netflix series that savors smashing together contradictory thoughts more than it enjoys polishing the pieces into a satisfying story.

Co-created by Dan Levy and Rachel Sennott, the half-hour series mainly follows Nicky (Levy) and Morgan (Taylor), two siblings with a strained yet uninhibited relationship. Nicky is a reverend at a small church in New Jersey, where he’s out to his congregation but hiding his relationship with Tareq (Jacob Gutierrez). “They expect me to be non-practicing,” Nicky says, by way of explaining why he’s hiding his boyfriend in a church that claims to be LGBTQ-friendly.

Morgan is a public school teacher who’s dating Max (Jack Innanen), an adult man who acts like another child she needs to look after. When he drops her off at work and she dares to get out of the car without showing him proper affection, Max huffily chucks an engagement ring at her back. “Are you proposing to me by throwing a ring at my back?,” she asks. Amazingly, they don’t break up on the spot, but it’s clear the former high school sweethearts aren’t on the same page anymore. He’s needy, and she’s already giving too much.

Then it happens: the inciting incident. Sent to fetch a gift for their dying grandmother, Nicky and Morgan pop into a strip mall’s novelty shop and try to purchase the nicest necklace they’ve got. But when the rude cashier won’t let them have the “display only” item, Morgan swipes it out of spite.

Say it with me: Big. Mistake.

Although her selection goes over like gangbusters with their impossible-to-please mother, Linda (Laurie Metcalf), it turns out the necklace wasn’t for sale because it wasn’t the cashier’s to sell. Yusuf (Boran Kuzum) was just holding onto it for someone else, and that someone else wants it back. Like, they really want it back — badly enough for Yusuf to track down Nicky at his house and then threaten Morgan at gunpoint.

OK. So… just give it back, right? Problem solved?

It’s not quite that easy, but it’s also not nearly as hard as the show makes it out to be. “Bad Mistakes” combines a family comedy with a crime thriller, relying on the intense and immediate anxiety provoked by its protagonists’ increasingly dire plight to induce fits of laughter from their hysterical behavior. Eventually and in brief spurts, it kind of works — like a lighthearted riff on the Safdie brothers, only with far more relatable leads and without the brothers’ eye for verisimilitude.

Abby Quinn and Laurie Metcalf in ‘Big Mistakes’Courtesy of Spencer Pazer / Netflix

Comparisons to the creators’ past hits are perhaps more appropriate: There’s the bickering brother-sister duo and sappy romance seen in “Schitt’s Creek,” as well as the brash character dynamics and generational tear-downs voiced in “I Love L.A.” Levy sells the love story well enough, and Ortega does a fine job as Sennott’s surrogate (who the role was originally, and clearly, written for). As Nicky and Morgan get pulled deeper and deeper into their new friend’s illicit business, they react to the risks in almost the exact same fashion: lots and lots of yelling. Sometimes they yell at each other, sometimes they yell at their opposition, sometimes it’s funny, sometimes it’s annoying. But the contrast is clear: These people don’t belong here.

Except maybe… they want to? “Bad Mistakes” toys around with the idea that Nicky needs to be pushed out of his comfort zone so he can learn to take more risks in his regular life. Similarly, Morgan needs to learn when to stand up for herself and say enough is enough, rather than stringing things along until she’s wasted her life without doing what she really wants to do. But neither of these character traits are even defined enough for me to feel certain that’s why they’re tempted to keep helping out gangsters, nor are the contradictions inherent to his faith and her public service explored in any substantial manner.

That’s not all that’s confusing across the first season. What dooms the show isn’t its ambitious, incongruent design; it’s in the undercooked execution. The first three episodes are a disaster, taking 90 minutes to establish a premise that needs to be wrapped up in the pilot, and littering the plot with enough holes to send even a more polished vehicle careening off track. By Episode 4, I thought I had a grip on what “Bad Mistakes” wants to be: a semi-traditional sitcom where Morgan and Nicky get a dangerous new assignment every episode, as they figure out why they’re drawn to their inadvisable side hustle.

But that’s not it. The first season is stubbornly serialized, despite its inability to maintain logic from scene to scene, let alone episode to episode. It also strands Metcalf (always good for a few laughs) in a season-long mayoral campaign, which — given what’s going on with her two eldest kids — could only ever end one way. (There’s a third sibling, Natalie, played by Abby Quinn, whose entire development is also reserved for the season’s final seconds.) When the inevitable finally arrives, rather than propel the show into Season 2, it ushers in an unpleasant, uninviting vibe that doesn’t gel with what makes sense for the characters or what’s best for the show. It’s a downer where an upper is very much needed.

Perhaps Levy can settle the tonal confusion if “Bad Mistakes” continues. Scaling back would solve a lot of issues. After all, there’s no law saying modern comedies have to be six different shows at once. But they do have to be funny and they do have to make sense, and this genre-bending original may simply be too broken to salvage.

Grade: C-

“Big Mistakes” premieres Thursday, April 9 on Netflix. All eight episodes of the first season will be released at once.