Dan Levy is back with a new scripted series, and it is nothing like the gentle Canadian sitcom that made him a household name. “Big Mistakes,” the schitt's creek creator new comedy he co-created with Rachel Sennott, is now streaming on Netflix, and it opens with a theft that quickly turns into a kidnapping, a family threat and a humiliating list of errands for two siblings who cannot seem to stop making the wrong choice.
Levy plays Nicky Dardano, a quasi-closeted pastor who leads a congregation that accepts queerness among its clergy only if they are nonpracticing. Taylor Ortega plays his sister, Morgan Dardano, an elementary-school teacher who comes home to suburban New Jersey after a failed attempt to make it as an actress in New York. She falls back into a relationship with her high-school boyfriend, played by Jack Innanen, while also stealing a necklace from a chintzy gift shop run by a Turkish gangster named Yusuf.
That petty theft sets off the show’s central crisis. Yusuf kidnaps Nicky and Morgan at gunpoint, threatens their family and then forces them to work off the debt with odd jobs. The pressure lands with the kind of blunt force that the series keeps leaning into, and Levy gives the story a far different tone from “Schitt’s Creek,” his earlier scripted series about a riches-to-rags family forced to downsize and rebuild.
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Yusuf, who repeatedly treats the siblings’ panic as a nuisance, dismisses them as “pieces of white bread” and tells them they can get away with anything in this country. When Morgan protests, he shrugs off the chaos, tells them to “just give him the cash and do the deal,” and later snaps that they are being very dramatic. Her response cuts through the absurdity: “Why is it only ever men that get involved in this shit?”
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The series’ premise gives Levy and Sennott room to push beyond the softer comic register that defined “Schitt’s Creek.” The show has been compared with “The Sopranos,” “The Bear” and “Weeds,” and its manic, overheated energy is closer to Sennott’s comic sensibility than to the polished warmth of Levy’s earlier work. That sharper edge is the point. “Big Mistakes” is not trying to revisit the old formula; it is trying to prove Levy can carry a messier, more volatile kind of story, and it does that by making every bad decision arrive with consequences.
