Dan Levy’s aptly named crime-comedy, <em>Big Mistakes</em>, fails to live up to the hype despite its A+ cast and epic finale. After the Emmy-winning series Schitt’s Creek, expectations were extremely high for Levy’s newest series, starring himself and Taylor Ortega as the dysfunctional brother-sister duo Nicky and Morgan.

Nicky and Morgan, a reverend and a school teacher, set out to get their grandmother a necklace before her death. When the shop owner, Yusuf, refuses to sell it to them, Morgan steals the golden tennis necklace. In retaliation, the shop owner blackmails them into working for his crime boss.

Everything from Big Mistakes’ trailer to its cast looked promising. The premise was zany and humorous. The creator, Dan Levy, had a great track record. Taking everything into account, the show should have been the next big comedy hit on Netflix. Unfortunately, the final result was packed with big mistakes, living up to its name.

The Storytelling in Big Mistakes Is Frustratingly Chaotic & Inconsistent

Netflix’s Big Mistakes is surprisingly honest with the audience about what they’re getting into. The first scene immediately establishes the tone and storytelling style, and the show follows through. Unfortunately, that storytelling style is best described as “give the audience almost no context about what’s happening and why they should care.”

When the first episode starts, we’re thrown into a hospital scene where an old woman with cancer has just pooped herself, and her family sits around bickering about whether the grandchildren should stay in the room as the mom cleans her up. The mom criticizes her children. The siblings can’t stand each other. Everyone seems to not-so-secretly hate each other.

I developed an uncanny feeling as if I’d walked into the wrong room and witnessed the middle of a family moment that should have stayed behind closed doors. Truly, I wish I could have just walked back out the door, because that would have been better than sticking with this frustrating Netflix crime-comedy.

Big Mistakes throws us to the wolves and expects us to figure things out as we go, but they never give us enough answers for it to be satisfying. Why do none of the siblings talk to each other? Why does Morgan steal a necklace? I couldn’t tell you the answer, and that’s basically the answer to every big question of the show. There’s no payoff.

The twists also have zero foreshadowing or narrative consistency. It feels like the writers put a bunch of ideas on slips of paper and drew them from a hat at random. It’s the Mad-Libs of storytelling. Big Mistakes keeps adding new events and characters without explaining anything. What’s worse, the character decisions get increasingly illogical over time.

By the end, the crime aspect of the story feels like a complete fever dream. It’s entertaining if you throw all logic out the window. I just wish Dan Levy had embraced this feeling of lunacy and fully leaned into the absurdity.

Sadly, they intercut the crime story with realistic romance and family drama. These intimate, quiet moments move slowly. The pacing and tone shift feel like whiplash due to the lack of transitions. The Netflix series also throws in the mom’s political campaign, which feels like an unnecessarily tacked-on subplot.

They could have thrown out realistic family drama and romantic issues entirely. There’s beauty in intentional chaos. Big Mistakes could have been a much better show if it had just let go.

In retrospect, it seems like they smashed three separate shows together with laughably thin connections that just aren’t believable. The most frustrating part is that each of the three has glimmers of good writing and character development. They all have at least one really solid scene that made me invested. Individually, they all had potential, but together, it just became messy.

What’s more, the issues were so distracting that I couldn’t fully enjoy the great romance between Nicky and his boyfriend, Tareq. This was arguably the best-written and most compelling part of the story, but it got overshadowed by everything else.

Great Actors Do Their Best With A Rough Script in Big Mistakes

Although Netflix’s dark comedy was pulled down by the script, Big Mistakes features fantastic actors who give their all in every moment of the show. Obviously, Nicky and Morgan are the most developed characters, and Dan Levy and Taylor Ortega did great as the lead characters. However, I’m more impressed by the other actors on the project.

I never got the impression that the actors were phoning it in. Instead, they made the best of a script that didn’t give them much to work with. They transformed two-dimensional writing into three-dimensional characters.

For example, Big Mistakes tells us next to nothing about Nicky and Morgan’s sister, Natalie, but Abby Quinn made her feel like a real person. Max is written as an insufferable manchild with no empathetic qualities, but actor Jack Innanen made him feel so realistic that I hated the character with every fiber of my being.

The Turkish gangster Yusuf receives little development despite being the third most important character in the plot. However, he still stands out as one of the best in the show because Boran Kuzum is a phenomenal actor. If I didn’t know this was Kuzum’s first job acting in English, I would never have guessed because he has fantastic vocal inflection.

Yusuf’s desperation and fear are palpable. Kuzum’s body movements only strengthened the emotions conveyed through his voice. I cared about him more than any other character because Kuzum brought an earnestness to this morally dubious character. I believed that he was a good person stuck in a terrible situation despite not having much writing to go off of.

Finally, Linda is one of the most unlikable characters in this show besides Max. She seems overly critical, emotionally manipulative, and a little bit selfish. However, Laurie Metcalf gives such a compelling performance in those last few episodes that she redeems this hateable character. I somehow walked away from Big Mistakes empathizing with Linda.

Ultimately, Linda and Yusuf became my favorite characters by the time credits rolled on that last episode. However, all actors in Big Mistakes deserve props for doing their best with a script that did them a disservice.

Big Mistakes Finally Gets Fun At The End Despite Its Issues

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Despite all its issues, Big Mistakes ends on a high note. The last two episodes have some of the best comedy, most entertaining plot twists, and great emotionally vulnerable scenes. The transitions feel smooth. The episodes still make little to no sense but I was along for this ride.

The family drama, romance, and crime actually feel connected for once all season long. They at least give us some answers to work with even if those answers bring up a dozen more questions.

Looking at these two episodes separately from everything else makes me finally understand why everybody involved thought this could be a good story in the first place. It isn’t quite redeeming enough to raise my rating but it does offer a small glimpse of what could come in future seasons.

Big Mistakes might have tripped and fallen on its face during its debut season but there’s still room to get back up again. If Netflix renews this crime-comedy series for another season I’m hopeful that season 2 can prove that<em></em> Big Mistakes wasn’t a big mistake at all.

All eight episodes of Big Mistakes drop April 9th on Netflix.