When Sennott Met Schitt's Creek

Big Mistakes comes from the team of Dan Levy and Rachel Sennott (Bottoms, I Love LA), and to both its credit and its detriment, it’s more Sennott than Schitt’s Creek. That is to say, it is funny — genuinely, sometimes uproariously funny — but it has almost zero heart to speak of. It’s a crime comedy populated by insane people doing insane things, and there is almost nothing about Big Mistakes that is relatable.

The series revolves largely around brother and sister Nicky (Levy) and Morgan (Taylor Ortega). He’s a closeted gay pastor, and she’s a bored middle-school teacher. Laurie Metcalf plays their overbearing, permanently aggrieved mother, Linda, and Abby Quinn plays Natalie, their younger sister — a woman so committed to kissing her mother’s ass that she’s essentially become a supporting character in her own life.

The action kicks off when Nicky and Morgan’s grandmother is on her deathbed. Linda insists they buy her some nice jewelry so she doesn’t go to the grave empty-handed. Nicky and Morgan visit a pawn shop, find a necklace the Turkish shop owner Yusuf (Boran Kuzum) refuses to sell them, and Morgan steals it. That night, Yusuf shows up threatening them both unless they return the necklace — which forces them to dig up their grandmother’s grave — and before you can fully process that thought, they’re tangled up with an Eastern European drug cartel.

That stolen necklace is the pebble that starts the avalanche. Nicky and Morgan find themselves climbing cartel rungs both inadvertently and against their will, while Nicky’s sermons grow increasingly half-assed, his relationship crumbles, and Morgan remains stuck with her obnoxious fiancé Max (scene-stealing Jack Innanen) — a guy she’s been with since they were kids, mostly out of inertia. Max’s controlling mother Annette (Elizabeth Perkins) is also pulling strings behind the scenes, determined to keep them together whether Morgan likes it or not.

I won’t call it “madcap,” but the comedy is outrageous. Levy’s character is a sweaty, wide-eyed disaster in a permanent state of freakout, and he and Morgan bicker with the exhausted energy of siblings who hate and love each other equally. The plot lurches from one escalating absurdity to the next without pausing long enough to let you think too hard about what thinly drawn caricatures most of these people are, which is probably by design.

It serves the comedy well enough, and Levy and Ortega manage to make their characters occasionally endearing despite the sketchiness. Big Mistakes is defiantly silly, and an easy one-to-two sitting binge. But once it’s over, and the endorphins from laughing wear off, not a lot of it sticks. And honestly? That’s fine. Not every comedy needs to be a Bill Lawrence or Mike Schur heartwarmer. Sometimes it’s enough just to laugh and move on.