Pod Insights Pop Culture Happy Hour Big Mistakes About this episode Dan Levy co-created and starred in the beloved Schitt’s Creek. And now he’s back with a new comedy on Netflix that’s got a very different vibe. In Big Mistakes, Levy and Taylor Ortega play dysfunctional siblings who get drawn deeper and deeper into the world of organized crime, even as their mom – the great Laurie Metcalf – runs for public office.
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0:21 Speaker 01 Dan Levy co-created and starred in Schitt's Creek, a show we loved around here. And now he's back with a new comedy on Netflix that's got a very different vibe. In Big Mistakes, Levy and Taylor Ortega play a hugely dysfunctional brother and sister who get drawn deeper and deeper into the world of organized crime, even as their mom, the great Lori Metcalf, runs for public office. I'm Glen Weldon, and today we're talking about Big Mistakes on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR.
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2:09 Speaker 01 Joining me today is Kristin Meinzler. She co-hosts The Nightly, a bedtime podcast for pop culture lovers. Hey, Kristin.
2:14 Speaker 03 Hey, Glenn. Nice to be back.
2:16 Speaker 01 Nice to have you. Also with us is the former host of Slate's Internet Culture Podcast, I See Why Am I, and former Pop Culture Happy Hour producer Candace Lim. Hey, Candace.
2:24 Speaker 04 Hello.
2:25 Speaker 01 Hello. Let's get to it. This'll be an interesting conversation. In Big Mistakes, we meet Nikki and Morgan, two siblings who are not where they want to be. Nikki is played by Dan Levy. He's an uptight pastor forced to keep his relationship with his boyfriend a secret from his parishioners. Morgan is played by Taylor Ortega. She's a teacher whose dreams of making it as an actor in New York fizzled out. After some business involving their dead grandmother and a diamond necklace, Nikki and Morgan find themselves doing odd jobs for a criminal organization. And as they struggle to extricate themselves from their new lives of crime, their mother Linda is running for mayor. She is played with a comic intensity so fierce that it can only be called Laurie Metcalfian by Laurie Metcalf.
3:08 Speaker 05 Sometimes I get scared that your closest relationship is with God. And don't take this the wrong way, honey, but God isn't touching your body for pleasure.
3:19 Speaker 01 All right.
3:19 Speaker 05 No, honey, I know that it's a sacred relationship, but you know what I'm talking about.
3:26 Speaker 01 The show is co-created by Levy and Rachel Senet, who created I Love LA. Big Mistakes is streaming on Netflix, and I kind of dug it, but from our conversations before taping this episode, I gather, Kristin, you didn't. Tell me more.
3:41 Speaker 03 All right. Well, yes, we disagree, much like the characters on the show, who bicker and bicker and bicker and bicker and bicker throughout the show.
3:49 Speaker 05 This is your fault, Morgan. It is entirely your fault, your problem. Okay, whatever. This is really reaffirming why we live in the same town and never speak to each other.
4:03 Speaker 03 It's not productive bickering. It's just fighting that does not bring the story closer to something. It just, in case you didn't notice, this is a bickering family. We're going to show you again that they bicker. But I think my bigger issue with the show is that these characters have no agency. They are pillars in their community. They own a business that has been a staple in their town for the past 70 years. Dan Levy plays a pastor who is respected and adored in his community. But despite having these prominent roles, they can't decide anything or do anything. They can't even fail because they don't ever try at anything. They are essentially chess pieces being moved on a board. And it just drove me nuts.
4:48 Speaker 03 I'm like, please do something. Please, please. And I will say by the end of the first season, our characters do start making choices. They do start propelling themselves forward of their own volition. And once that started happening, I really did enjoy the show. But it was the slog to get there for me.
5:08 Speaker 01 Okay. Oh, the S word. We're busting out the S word. It's early in the podcast. All right. Candace, S word or no?
5:18 Speaker 04 Sorry, Glenn. I'm going to use the B word. I think this show is kind of boring.
5:21 Speaker 01 Oh, boring slog? Oh, no.
5:23 Speaker 04 I know, I know. So here's the deal. Like, I was interested in the show because of the Rachel Sennett part. I really like her show. I love L.A. And I was kind of like, okay, like, how does a Dan Levy Rachel Sennett show work? I was like, I'm curious about how the puzzle pieces work. And the answer is they don't. Because Rachel is, her touch is just so not present in this project's tone or conception. I find her to be very kind of like sexy but dark woke. And I find this show very sexless, which hey, maybe that's just Dan Levy's bag and go for it. But I felt like this show was just like one really long Schitt's Creek episode. And I don't think that's really where I'm at in terms of what I'm looking for in like a TV show that should be kind of funny and should be kind of like wild and crazy. And I was just like, eh.
6:08 Speaker 03 Hold on, one long Schitt's Creek episode would be a compliment.
6:11 Speaker 01 Okay. Uh huh. I disagree with both of you for different reasons. Isn't that interesting?
6:17 Speaker 04 Go for it.
6:18 Speaker 01 Well, I mean, basically, look, there's a cheat code to the me's of the world. If you want to hook a me. There's a very simple formula, it turns out, I found out by watching the show. You just get Laurie Metcalf to scream at a dying old woman in scene one, and I'm in. That's it. That's all it takes.
6:32 Speaker 05 Mom, what do you want for your birthday from the kids? I don't want a birthday. What do you want for your birthday from Nicholas and Morgan? Who are they?
6:43 Speaker 01 And certainly, there's a tendency to think it's Laurie Metcalf, you just wind her up and let her go. Whatever happens is going to be worth watching, and that's kind of true. But here, you still have to write for her and write to her. And I would argue that Levy and Sennett are doing for Metcalf what Levy and the writers' room did for Catherine O'Hara on Schitt's Creek. You know the actor, you know what they can deliver, you write to them. You give them room to do what you hired them to do. So you give the Laurie Metcalf character a hardness that's funny, but you also make her want something so desperately, which is also funny. But then you honor that reality, right? You ground it a bit, and later in the season, she gets a tiny little monologue to explain why she wants to be mayor of this town, and I thought that was gold.
7:25 Speaker 05 When I knew that the day would come when your Nona would be gone and there wasn't anybody else I needed to take care of, I just thought, well, why not reach for a little power?
7:37 Speaker 01 I like this whole show. I kept thinking, ironically, Candace, I thought, this is Schitt's Creek without the hugs and schmoopiness. Schitt's Creek, in that first season, we don't like to talk about. But Schitt's Creek, before it softened, before it sanded down and rounded out the character's edges. And that's not fair, because I'm comparing it just to Levy's work, and I don't know Sennett's work, I haven't watched All of L.A. And it's also not fair, because, I mean, Levy made a film in 2023 called Good Grief, which didn't work for me at all. That felt more like journaling, felt more like a therapy session than it was a work of art meant to engage, you know, the world outside his own head. Clearly, the guy's got schmoopiness to spare, but this is a co-creation. This is half Rachel Sennett.
8:21 Speaker 01 And so I'm grateful for you to kind of saying what the Rachel Sennett DNA is. But Kristin, did you pick up on any Rachel Sennett thing here? Like, what's the formula?
8:30 Speaker 03 I know Rachel Sennett best from Bottoms, which is a movie. I love. I think Bottoms is fantastic. It feels raw and unfiltered, even though it's very well-written and very funny. And I was with the characters the whole way, but I felt like the fighting in Bottoms was the whole story and what propelled the story. And so it made a lot of sense to me, whereas in Big Mistakes, the fighting just constantly felt like this isn't pushing the story forward.
8:59 Speaker 01 Okay.
8:59 Speaker 03 Unless that's the point of the show is just to watch people not productively bicker. And there's a lot of that. And I'm glad you both have brought up Schitt's Creek though, because one thing I did think about watching the show was the first season of Schitt's Creek, which as you said, Glenn, we almost always never speak of because it was so terrible. By the end of the first season, I did actually start to have feelings of affection for Schitt's Creek. And I felt the same way with Big Mistakes. By the end of Big Mistakes, season one, I was like, oh, well, now I'm starting to feel something for these people, even though I hated them for most of the season. Maybe if it gets picked up for a second or third season, maybe much like Schitt's Creek, I will hold it near and dear to my heart. I will cuddle it at night and I will love it.
9:42 Speaker 01 It doesn't sound like it.
9:43 Speaker 03 It was a little tough. And I cannot tell you how much I hated the first season of Schitt's Creek. I think I tried watching it 10 times before I could get through it.
9:51 Speaker 04 Yeah. I mean, the Rachel Senate of it all, like, I love that you're bringing up Bottoms, because that's the thing you expect from Rachel, which is like brash, honest, too honest, like Gen Z, just like straight to the wall. I think that is where I got caught up, because the show I actually feel is very reserved in a way that kind of does remind me of Schitt's Creek, which is that, look, like, Schitt's Creek is about a small town, as the show also is. And you kind of have similar archetypes or characters being played here, right? Like Dan Levy plays a pastor. The sister is a schoolteacher. The mom's family owned this hardware store for like 70 years. And these are people who are supposed to be like upstanding, you know, citizens of their city.
10:34 Speaker 04 My thing, though, is that like, I just have like very little to no faith in like institutional government, big or local. So in my head, I'm just kind of like. Like, what is this obsession with bringing up that the dad is like former chief of police? That I found so like weird and tacky and I get it. It's supposed to kind of like put this umbrella over them of like, oh, but like, isn't it crazy that they're like canoodling with the bad guys when they should be the good guys? And I was like, well, hot take, I was rooting for the bad guys the entire time. And it's not because like this family is bad. It's because I was just like, they're kind of boring. And I think maybe that feeds into what you're saying about agency, Kristen of like, it's not that these are people that are like not worth rooting for. I'm just like, are you worth making a show about? I don't think so.
11:17 Speaker 01 Now, see, my favorite thing about the show, and this speaks to something you both have brought up. My favorite thing about the show is how much it almost dares you to like these people. Neither one of you saying, oh, I don't like them. That's why the show is bad. I'm grateful you're not saying that because we've said on the show many times that likability is a hoax. Likability is a mugs game. Likability is this thing that is held up by, you know, screenwriting teachers and screening books and schools as the only thing, the be all, end all, the thing you need. But you don't need it. What you need is to find the main characters interesting and individual and believable and human. And if it's a comedy, you need them to be funny. And where we're differing, it seems, is I found them all of those things. And you all found them none of those.
11:58 Speaker 01 And I like to think, and I have no basis for this being true, but in my heart, Levy saw the Schitt's Creek fandom, right? The squeaking over Patrick and David. And the way that fandom became kind of louder than the show he made and thought, yeah, I don't want to do that again. And, and so I'm going to make this brother and sister not David and Alexis. David and Alexis bickered also, as you know, Kristen, but they also had each other's backs at the end of the day. There is a real gulf between Nikki and Morgan. And I was grateful it was there. Me, I was grateful that it was there because you had to honor it. You couldn't wave it away with one act of kindness. Because that's not how families work.
12:40 Speaker 01 When the gulf does get bridged, it gets bridged a little later in the season artificially in a way that I found very funny and very weirdly accurate. And in a way that I don't want to spoil here. So you don't have to like them, right? But it sounds like both of you got tired of them and found them actively annoying. I understand why that's a deal breaker.
13:02 Speaker 03 Yeah, I think annoying is exactly the word that I was feeling. And I agree with you, like likability, what does that even mean? And I love lots of shows. I've loved many shows over the years with characters who were quote unquote unlikable. You know, Arrested Development, Transparent. There are so many shows I've loved over the years where people have complained, nobody is likable. I don't need that, but I need to care about the characters. Oh, yeah. And I just don't know if I cared that much about them. And then I'm just gonna do a little old lady minds or moment here, a little kids get off my lawn moment. But I had to have the remote control in my hand the entire time I was watching the show because the sound mixing was driving me nuts.
13:43 Speaker 03 There's whisper fighting, yelling fighting, whisper fighting, yelling fighting, sound mixing, machine guns going off, very quietly explaining why I hate you and want to kill you right now. Don't you dare tell mom. Right. I'm gonna stop. Old lady minds are off her soapbox. Sorry.
13:58 Speaker 04 I mean, we talk about unlikability and I actually think is that not what like the Rose family was? They were so unlikable as like four spoiled members of a rich family. And then at some point that show like turns the key. Here's my thing, I think I love annoying people. I'm gonna say the people on I Love LA, for example, extremely annoying. I live among them every day. Am I one of them? We'll talk about that later. I think if you are annoying, are you at least moving the needle somewhere? Cause I think one of my genuine like reasons for rooting for the bad guys here is because I see in this show like corruption and I'm like, honestly? That's maybe a better option than local politics, which is a farce in itself. And so I'm kind of like, well, at least the bad guys are getting stuff done.
14:43 Speaker 04 At least they're moving something forward. And in a weird way, I'm like, they're building community through trade. Hey now, that's local economy. And yeah.
14:51 Speaker 03 That is such a good point, Candace, because our main characters are essentially non-player characters. They're like in the video game, the characters who just are there while you're driving your grand theft auto car and knocking down buildings and they're just on the side.
15:03 Speaker 01 I understand where you're coming from in one very specific way, and it speaks to agency that you both brought up. There was one thing that almost had me slacking our producers and saying, yep, we're not going to do this. I hate this show. I don't get the show. Happened in the very first episode, and it's a plot thing. It has nothing to do with characterization. It's the so-called inciting incident, which is a screenwriting term for the moment that kicks the plot into motion. This show isn't a sitcom, right? It isn't just a vibe. It's a crime story at heart. And that means it depends on a narrative, a narrative framework of escalation. So you have to incite that escalation correctly. If you don't buy the inciting incident, you don't buy anything that comes after it. There is a necklace on their dead grandmother's neck. Nikki, the Dan Levy character, is
15:46 Speaker 01 a pastor who is performing the service. He has unique access to that casket. He knew what he needed to do. He knew what time he had to do it by. He had all the time in the world to do it. He had ample opportunity afforded only to him in all the universe. There was only one person who could have been in that room with that casket alone, and it's him. His mom comes in and says, we have to move her now because she's late for her own funeral. I was like, what? We only saw him in that room for like 30 seconds. He could have shown up hours and hours earlier. He could have spent two hours just futzing over that body. And nobody would have batted an eye. I don't buy it for a second. And we join the action that late? Why do we join the action that late? Why is she late for
16:30 Speaker 01 her own funeral? It's like every scene in a classroom, which, you know, opens like 30 seconds before the school bell. It's ridiculous. It bugged me so much. And in interviews, Levy has said that he and Senate wrote that pilot in a day, and that's never happened before for me. And I was like, yeah, that necklace business is some first draft nonsense. That, that you needed to interrogate your plot. You needed to do a better job of laying the track if it's going to support the entire show.
16:56 Speaker 03 Yeah.
16:57 Speaker 01 All of the narrative weight of the show rests on, oh, he didn't get the necklace.
17:01 Speaker 03 Yeah.
17:02 Speaker 01 Why didn't he get the necklace?
17:04 Speaker 03 Yeah. And it's the second time in the pilot that he Gets derailed because he chose not to lock a door also.
17:11 Speaker 01 There's also that.
17:12 Speaker 04 I mean, I'm glad you brought up that point, Glenn, because what I actually thought about is the fact that this thing has happened on another show that I think we both love, Dairy Girls, and they did it so much better. There's a dead woman, they're trying to get the earrings, and it's just like, they do it so much faster, shorter, better, sharper, better. To which I then say, I think that a better version of the show is How to Get to Heaven from Belfast.
17:37 Speaker 01 Oh, sure.
17:37 Speaker 04 Like, I think that is just as crimey, just as thrillery. It is longer, but it's, it has an energy and it has a pace that honestly is more like Rachel Sennett but Irish. And I think that's where this leaves me a little saggy of like, I do think that, you know, my heart rate finally kicked up towards like, end, end, end of the penultimate into the finale. I was like, OK, like, I'm actually getting interested. But leading up to that, I'm like, I'm having a hard time buying in. I'm having a hard time investing, to which I then think, maybe I just have a Dan Levy problem.
18:07 Speaker 01 Oh, yeah.
18:07 Speaker 04 OK, Schitt's Creek was fun.
18:09 Speaker 01 That's fine. Christian, you get the last word.
18:11 Speaker 03 I like Dan Levy.
18:12 Speaker 04 Yes.
18:13 Speaker 03 I want to make clear, Dan Levy, if you're listening right now, I like you. I love it when you show up in a show and I don't expect it. I love in Sex Education.
18:20 Speaker 04 Oh.
18:21 Speaker 03 When you end up being a smarmy writing teacher who has a delicate ego and you're just a terrible man.
18:27 Speaker 01 Yep.
18:27 Speaker 03 I love every version of Dan Levy. I think he's great. And I do have hope for the show. The final two episodes, I was like, I, I'm actually into it now. So I do hope that the same thing happens to me as what happened with Schitt's Creek, that I will be with the show all the way if there's a season two. But if there's not a season two, I'll probably never speak of the show again.
18:50 Speaker 01 Hmm. Look, this doesn't happen a lot where I'm out here planting a flag on the hill, being assailed, assailed, I say, by other people who made very good points that I kind of agree with. That brings us to the end of our show. Kristin Meinz or Candace Lim, thank you so much for being here, and thank you for not holding back.
19:09 Speaker 04 Hmm, thank you.
19:11 Speaker 03 Thanks, Glenn.
19:12 Speaker 01 This episode was produced by Hafsa Pappa, and my cats have been edited by our showrunner, Jessica Reedy, and Halokamun provides our theme music. Thank you for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glen Weldon, and we'll see you all next time.
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