Six years is a long time to wait. Since Schitt’s Creek wrapped its Emmy-sweeping final season in 2020, Dan Levy has occupied a curious liminal space for television audiences: beloved, proven, and conspicuously absent from the small screen. Big Mistakes, his new Netflix crime-comedy co-created with Rachel Sennott (I Love LA), ends that wait in the most unexpected way possible.
Set in small-town New Jersey across eight episodes, the series follows Nicky (Levy) and Morgan (Taylor Ortega), a pastor and a school teacher whose errand to buy their dying grandmother a necklace spirals into full criminal entanglement. The show surrounds its leads with a strong ensemble: Laurie Metcalf as the overbearing and politically ambitious Linda; Abby Quinn as youngest sibling Natalie; Boran Kuzum as Yusuf, the shop worker who pulls them into the syndicate; Jacob Gutierrez as Nicky’s secret boyfriend Tareq; and Jack Innanen as Morgan’s overgrown-teenager boyfriend Max.
The production had a turbulent development, with cast changes and writers’ room upheaval, and some of that turbulence is visible on screen. What’s also visible is real creative ambition.
One Stolen Necklace, Eight Episodes of Consequences
The premise is deceptively simple. Morgan shoplifts what looks like a cheap display necklace from a gift shop after the cashier refuses to sell it. The necklace belongs to a crime boss. Yusuf, the shop clerk who was minding it, tracks the siblings down and pulls them into working for the syndicate as a condition of their survival. From there, Big Mistakes sets itself the challenge of being three distinct shows simultaneously: a crime thriller, a family comedy, and a relationship drama. Its success depends almost entirely on which episode you’re watching.
The early episodes are the show’s biggest obstacle to its own success. The first two or three hours move cautiously, stacking character introductions and domestic dynamics without locking in the stakes or the tone. There’s a familiar feeling to the setup. This genre of ordinary people stumbling into organized crime has been well-trodden since Ozark and Breaking Bad, and Big Mistakes doesn’t immediately distinguish itself from those predecessors in its plotting. The criminal world Nicky and Morgan fall into is sketchily drawn, more suggested than established, and this fuzziness makes it hard to feel the weight of what they’re getting into.
Around the midpoint, something shifts. The show stops being tentative and leans into its own chaos, and the results are genuinely propulsive. The rhythm becomes clearer: sibling bickering punctuated by increasingly absurd criminal assignments, with the family drama folding back in rather than running parallel. The mayoral campaign subplot, which initially reads as a tonal non sequitur, finds its place as a sharp comic frame for small-town political vanity. Linda campaigning under the banner of “Family First” while her two eldest children are embedded in organized crime turns out to be funnier than almost anything in the crime plot itself.
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The finale earns a degree of goodwill the earlier episodes hadn’t fully constructed. Threads converge with more grace than expected, even if some of the logic still has air pockets. It’s the version of the show the creators probably had in mind from the start, which only sharpens the frustration that it took six episodes to get there.
The Cast Carries What the Script Cannot Always Provide
Dan Levy has spent years being associated with the operatic self-confidence of David Rose, so watching him play Nicky is a genuine recalibration. Nicky is a man who has organized his entire life around managing other people’s comfort. He’s out as gay to his congregation but has agreed to keep that identity “non-practicing,” which is the kind of conditional acceptance that sounds almost reasonable until you watch what it costs him daily. Levy plays this exhaustion with real restraint. His performance is grounded in quiet duty rather than wit, which marks a meaningful stretch from his Schitt’s Creek persona. Occasionally Nicky gets a little lost in the noise around him, and you wish the show gave him more room to breathe.
Taylor Ortega as Morgan is the season’s most purely entertaining presence. Sharp-tongued and chronically impulsive, Morgan is the kind of character who causes her own problems and then somehow makes you root for her anyway. Her arc traces an unexpected discovery: someone who has spent years feeling like a failure at everything might actually be quite good at being a criminal. Ortega plays this with a sly charisma, and her chemistry with Levy, rocky in the early episodes, develops into something genuinely warm and funny by the season’s back half. Her relationship with Max is observed with real precision: two people who made emotional sense at seventeen and simply never updated the arrangement.
Laurie Metcalf gives the season’s best performance. Linda could have been a stock comic mother, the critical and emotionally manipulative type who exists primarily to generate conflict and guilt. Metcalf won’t allow that. She layers Linda with genuine vulnerability, making the character’s love for her children visible even through every passive-aggressive comment and political calculation. Her scenes in the mayoral campaign thread are the funniest in the show, and when the season asks her to be emotionally exposed in the final episodes, she delivers that with equal precision.
The supporting cast is quietly exceptional across the board. Boran Kuzum as Yusuf is the season’s most surprising element. Playing a morally compromised character whose desperation and fundamental decency are in constant conflict, Kuzum brings physical and vocal precision that is especially striking given this is his first English-language role. Abby Quinn as Natalie is largely held in reserve, her perfectionism and hunger for maternal approval sketched in rather than fully drawn, but Quinn makes her feel real in the limited space she’s given. Jack Innanen makes Max genuinely uncomfortable to watch in the best possible way, and Jacob Gutierrez brings warmth to Tareq, even as the romance remains the show’s most underdeveloped thread.
What the Show Is Really About, Beneath the Crime Plot
Big Mistakes works best as a show about the specific anxiety of incremental self-sabotage. The crime plot is the engine, but the fuel is something more culturally resonant: the millennial experience of looking at your life and suspecting that every small bad decision you made got you here, and now here is a lot harder to escape than you thought. Morgan’s line early in the season, that she fears she’ll live her whole life without doing anything that mattered, lands harder than most of the crime thriller mechanics, precisely because it doesn’t need a crime syndicate to be true. Most people watching will recognize that feeling from their own kitchen table.
The family writing is where Levy’s ear is sharpest. The casual cruelties of adult siblings reuniting, the psychological regression that kicks in the moment you’re back under your parents’ roof, the specific mixture of love and contempt that only exists between people who share a childhood: all of this is observed with a precision that the crime plot rarely matches. The show’s funniest and most truthful moments come from character contradiction rather than plot mechanics. A pastor who lies to protect a criminal. A mother who preaches family values while systematically undermining her children’s confidence. A woman who can’t commit to her boyfriend but commits fully to organized crime.
The queer dimension of Nicky’s story is handled with more thoughtfulness than the genre usually offers. His experience of being technically out but practically closeted, hiding Tareq to protect his congregation’s comfort, feels rooted in something real about how acceptance can be offered conditionally and accepted anyway because the alternative is worse. The show doesn’t editorialize about this. It just shows it, and that restraint is quietly powerful.
Where the writing falls short is in the crime mechanics. Ivan’s criminal world is vague to the point of incoherence, several twists arrive without adequate groundwork, and the three-strand structure of crime, family, and politics is unevenly served across the season. The Nicky and Tareq romance, arguably the most emotionally rich thread in the show, gets the least space of all.
A Rough First Season That Still Earns a Second Look
Big Mistakes is an uneven debut that is better than its worst episodes and short of its best ones. That gap is wide enough to matter, but the show’s ceiling is visible, and that visibility is what makes it worth the patience it demands across its first half.
The cast is the most reliable argument for watching. There is no weak link in this ensemble, and collectively they make more of the material than the material sometimes earns. Metcalf alone is worth scheduling time around. The final two episodes, more confident and better integrated than anything preceding them, demonstrate what this show looks like when it finds its register and stays there.
The comparison to Succession’s tonal territory, dark and funny and genuinely uncomfortable, is apt in ambition. Big Mistakes has that same interest in family as a system of mutual damage held together by affection, and when the writing catches up to that idea, the show delivers.
Levy and Sennott have built something with a recognizable voice, even when the first season can’t consistently sustain it. The finale opens doors for a second season in ways that feel earned rather than engineered, and the show that walks through those doors could be considerably sharper.
Worth watching. Bring patience for the first three episodes. The rest repays it.
Big Mistakes is a dark comedy crime series that premiered on Netflix on April 9, 2026. Created by Dan Levy and Rachel Sennott, the show follows two dysfunctional siblings, Nicky and Morgan, who find themselves blackmailed into the world of organized crime after a petty theft goes wrong. Set against the backdrop of suburban New Jersey where their mother is running for mayor, the series explores themes of family loyalty and survival through a sharp, irreverent lens. You can watch the entire first season exclusively on Netflix.
Where to Watch Big Mistakes Online
Full Credits
Title: Big Mistakes
Distributor: Netflix
Release date: April 9, 2026
Rating: TV-MA
Running time: 30–37 minutes per episode
Director: Dean Holland, Adam Bernstein, Colin Bucksey, Iain B. MacDonald
Writers: Dan Levy, Rachel Sennott, Jacqui Rivera, Etan Frankel, Erin Levy, Timothy Greenberg
Producers and Executive Producers: Dan Levy, Rachel Sennott, Ann-Marie McGintee, Dean Holland, Etan Frankel, Timothy Greenberg
Cast: Dan Levy, Taylor Ortega, Laurie Metcalf, Jack Innanen, Boran Kuzum, Abby Quinn, Elizabeth Perkins, Jacob Gutierrez, Joe Barbara, Josh Fadem, Mark Ivanir
Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Maryse Alberti, Chris Teague
Editors: Trevor Ambrose, Jamie Alain
Composer: Photay (Evan Shornstein)
The Review
Big Mistakes
Big Mistakes is a flawed but worthwhile debut season held together by an exceptional cast and a sharp sense of what family dysfunction actually feels like. The crime plotting is thin and the early episodes test your patience, but the show's emotional core is genuine. Levy and Sennott have a clear creative voice, even when the execution stumbles. The final episodes leave you wanting more, which is the most honest endorsement a rocky first season can earn.
PROS
- Laurie Metcalf delivers a career-highlight performance
- Strong ensemble with no weak links
- Sharp, precise family dialogue
- Nicky's queer storyline is handled with rare nuance
- The final two episodes are genuinely excellent
- Boran Kuzum is a revelation
CONS
- First two to three episodes are sluggish and tonally uncertain
- Crime world is vaguely drawn with fuzzy stakes
- Nicky and Tareq's romance is underserved
- Sibling chemistry takes too long to develop
- Several plot twists lack setup
