Steve on TV: Four Nicks, a funeral and a shark attack

There’s plentiful violence

We’re living through a bloody time, folks. That’s the message, at least, coming from the streaming series and films I watched over the past weeks. Almost all of them resolved their plots with sudden bursts of plasma-spurting violence — through mafioso slaughters in more than one, through a centuries-old family curse or from that old reliable standby: massive shark attack! You should also be aware that, inexplicably, there’s a ton of characters named Nick out there.

So be careful, whatever you happen to be watching.

Let’s start with the show I least expected to detour into bloodshed. Co-created by Dan Levy, the new Netflix series Big Mistakes kicks off like a cousin of his beloved Schitt’s Creek. Again, we have a couple of adult siblings in perpetual squabble mode: Levy’s semi-closeted pastor Nicky and Taylor Ortega as his chaotic schoolteacher sister, Morgan. As in Creek, the duo has an outsized, performative mother, here played by Laurie Metcalf (instead of the late, great Catherine O’Hara). She’s Linda, a hardware store owner running for mayor of their small town; if Metcalf chews the scenery a few bites too many, well, she does it well.

What Mistakes doesn’t have is the sort of father figure played by Levy’s real-life dad, Eugene, who created Creek with him. Instead, Nicky and Morgan fall under the sway of a very different daddy figure, local crime kingpin Ivan (Mark Ivanir). He enlists them in a series of “favors” after Morgan shoplifts a necklace in a shop managed by one of his underlings, Yusuf (Boran Kuzum). It’s a long story that begets many more: grave robbing, buying bulls at auction, renting a skeevy apartment and traveling to Miami for a sit-down with members of a drug cartel.

Did I mention this is a comedy? It is, often a very funny one, driven by the prickly rivalry between Nicky and Morgan. (It recalls the banter in Creek between Levy and his sis in that show, played by Annie Murphy.) Rachel Sennott of I Love LA co-created the show, and you can easily imagine her snarking her way through the Morgan role.

Throughout the eight episodes, Nicky has to work on his relationship with boyfriend Tareq (Jacob Gutierrez), who’s tired of having to hide because Nick isn’t out to his congregation. Morgan meanwhile copes with her own boyfriend, Max (Jack Innanen), a sweet goofball whose adoration for her isn’t mutual. That sitch is complicated by Max’s mom, Annette (Elizabeth Perkins), instrumental in garnering community support for Linda’s mayoral campaign.

Like its characters, Big Mistakes strays out of its comfort zone. The stakes get raised in a very sudden, bloody way at the end of episode seven. The show’s last hour is spent on wrapping up loose ends while making way for a big reveal that shifts our understanding of everything and makes a second season almost mandatory.

Also on Netflix, Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen is another twisted-genre examination of relationships, created by Haley Z. Boston (maker of the beguilingly strange 2021 series Brand New Cherry Flavor).

We meet fiancés Rachel (Camila Morrone of The Night Manager) and (yes) Nicky (Adam DiMarco of Overcompensating), driving to his wealthy family’s sprawling “cabin” in the woods, where they’re planning to be married in the company of his siblings and parents (played by Ted Levine and a facially, um, altered Jennifer Jason Leigh).

On the drive, Rachel and Nicky have a playful, bantering connection that makes them seem like the perfect match. But things get weird fast with tales of serial killers, missing dogs, a glimpse of a dead fox in a passing field and, more than anything, Rachel’s encounter with a ghoul. In the bathroom of a sleazy bar, she meets a looming weirdo (Zlatko Buric, known only as The Witness), who growls, “Are you sure he’s the one?”

Rachel soon has reason to wonder, indeed, if Nicky is the right guy for her as she meets his extended family. His sister Portia (Gus Birney, over the top in just the right amount) is a bubbly control freak, intense enough to be the harried bridezilla herself. Then there’s Nicky’s brother Jules (Jeff Wilbusch) and his arch wife Nell (Karla Crome). These two are barely hanging together as a couple, but their barbed interactions and the actors’ fine work become a secret weapon that helps keep the show together when it starts to spin apart. And boy, does it.

Something’s first two episodes are a master class in accumulating dread and weirdness. When Rachel has a freakout, convinced she’s been lured to the family’s isolated estate only to be murdered, you’re on her side. Things feel that crazy. In my notes I wrote, How can this sustain itself for six more eps? Well, it can’t. The show settles into a long rumination about fate. What would you do if your life literally depended on marrying the person who is truly your soulmate?

Interesting question, but maybe not one that justifies the running time. That’s especially true because — like Hulu’s Antarctic-set mystery A Murder at the End of the World from 2023 — the set-bound show infects you with the same claustrophobia felt by its snowed-in characters. Even so, I recommend Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen because it’s as obstinately memorable as its very long title. If it doesn’t outdo the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones, it earns runner-up status. Show creator Boston is no David Lynch, but, at its best, her dark kookiness marks her as a member of that late, great artist’s family tree.

HULU

Now prepare yourself for two Nicks in the same movie, played by the same actor. That’s Hulu’s Mike & Nick & Nick & Alice. I’m a sucker for time-travel narratives, with all their mind games and paradoxes. So I enjoyed the setup for writer-director BenDavid Grabinski’s flick but felt let down by the action-comedy cliches that clog its second half.

Looking more than ever like a barely-made bed, Vince Vaughn plays a mob hoodlum named Nick who travels from the near future into the present to try to stop himself from putting a hit on his old friend and colleague Mike (James Marsden, maintaining his Jury Duty/Paradise streak as a small-screen MVP and aging as well as co-star Vaughn isn’t).

Nick has a fatal grudge against Mike because Mike has been sleeping with Nick’s wife, Alice (Eiza González, who comes on strong but is soon stuck just playing The Girl). As the clock counts down to the time Future Nick knows Mike is due to be killed, he enlists Present Mike to alter fate. There’s mild pleasure in the sub-Pulp Fiction dialogue, with character riffing on pop culture (a lot of discussion of Gilmore Girls). There’s something nostalgic to it; most screenwriters have finally stopped trying to imitate Tarantino. (That seems to be Pete Hegseth’s job now.) But M&N&N&A loses whatever creative steam it had by capping most of its scenes with endless rounds of bullets and spurting blood packs. Yawn.  

Oh, and remember all the earlier mentions of Schitt’s Creek? One of that show’s great assets, Emily Hampshire (deadpan hotel manager Stevie), turns up here as a crooked cop just long enough to make you wish the movie had more of her.

NETFLIX

Rounding out this month’s bloody selections, Thrash is one of those portmanteau disaster flicks, like Sharknado, where just one calamity won’t do. No, here the characters must survive a hurricane, tsunami-like flooding and ravenous bull sharks that invade the newly underwater streets and homes of this small South Carolina town. The many killings are amusingly staged, and the CG is OK; that’s probably what matters most in product like this.

The potential human fish bait includes Bridgerton’s Phoebe Dynevor as very pregnant Lisa, trapped in her flooded Mini Cooper; Whitney Peak as Dakota, a teen trapped in a nearby house who could save Lisa if she got over her agoraphobia; Djimon Hounsou as Dakota’s uncle, an oceanographer who spends the movie sailing to rescue his niece; and a trio of redneck teens living with abusive foster parents. It’s fun watching these two awful adults become shark food. Unfortunately, the kids are depicted as the worst stereotypes of cracker stupidity. Maybe that’s because writer-director Tommy Wirkola is Norwegian; though it’s set in S.C., the film was shot in Australia, and none of the lead actors are U.S. natives. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. 

ODDS AND ENDS

Starting April 29, Prime Video will air the miniseries The House of the Spirits, an eight-episode version of Isabel Allende’s beloved novel, filmed in Chile, the setting of the writer’s epic of family ties and political upheaval. With its generous running time, the show promises to be more detailed and nuanced than the compromised, compressed Hollywood film of 1993. But anyone hoping for something close to Netflix’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, an adaptation of the first half of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s novel that exceeded my expectations — don’t get too excited. I watched the first couple of episodes but couldn’t get past the indifferent pacing and look of the show, shot with the flat, lusterless lighting of 1980s primetime TV movies. Maybe it gets better.

Also on Prime, I’ve watched the first half of creator-star Riz Ahmed’s showbiz comedy Bait. Ahmed plays a middle-tier London actor named Shah Latif, who’s trying to balance his identity as a good Muslim member of his extended family with his chance at becoming the next James Bond. The show is funny and smart in its observations on cultural signifying and the perils of social media. I’ll finish watching it eventually; I’m a big fan of anything Ahmed does. But after Apple TV’s The Studio, Disney’s Wonder Man and even the great HBO Max show Hacks, now in its final season, I’m a little worn out on shows about show biz.

And to be honest, after the other things I’ve watched lately, I’m a little worried that one of Shah’s audition scenes might erupt in gunfire, a bloody curse or a shark attack.

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Steve Murray is an award-winning journalist and playwright who has covered the arts as a reporter and critic for many years. Catch up to Steve’s previous columns here.