Service: Netflix
Season Year: 2025
Watch: Netflix
I’ll get the good stuff out of the way first. The music is totally my jam. In fact, the entire series starts off with a Walkmen song, which is something I’ll never complain about. The two leads are supposed to be cool guys right around my age, so it all makes sense. Me being a cool guy, I guess. Otherwise, this is an absolute slog of a TV show. Eight episodes, all of which hover right around the one-hour mark, feel endlessly long and overworked. Monologues and dialogues more for atmospherics rather than narrative trajectory. Lots of people with no discernible human characteristics — or at least any likable human characteristics — constantly messing with one another, trying to make it in the restaurant world, but also just kind of being asshats. Honestly, the two menu items the writers could think to “make” for the NYT glowingly-reviewed establishment is a hamburger and literally a foie hot dog. It’s not a convincing portrayal of cheffing or the industry as a whole.
As mentioned, the Black Rabbit is a restaurant. A very hip one in the South Street Seaport area down under the Brooklyn Bridge. It has a celeb-adjacent clientele and a vibey VIP room upstairs for the rich and fancy to after-party and hang while DJs spin. So I suppose it’s also kind of a club? I don’t know, I never got invited to these types of places. But the place itself is heavily based on The Spotted Pig, both the good and the bad. To be fair, their Roquefort burger there was damn tasty. I did not partake in any of the shenanigans happening upstairs on any of my visits there, of course. The Black Rabbit is named after its two founders’ band of the same name. Two very cool brothers, Jake (Jude Law) and Vince (Jason Bateman) Friedken, whose musical dreams ended, but their culinary flair took flight… Okay, the band thing. We see flashbacks of the boys as youths in a violent and broken home. None of it really involved music or musicality. Sure, Vince wears a few band t-shirts in the current timeline — Sonic Youth and Pixies from what I recall — but otherwise it’s completely unclear where, how or why these two dudes picked up instruments and apparently formed a guitar and drum duo that was good enough to get a label deal. This whole piece of the backstory and plot — which should be formative and timely — was completely underdeveloped and glossed over. Considering both are in their 50s, it’s completely unclear what the heck they’d been doing between their brush with rock ‘n’ roll glory and the emergence of this restaurant dream. You’d think they could have fleshed out the timeline a little better rather than torturing us with yet another scene of Bateman mumbling through his bangs and scruffy beard about what a fuck-up he is.
So, anyway, there’s this popular joint, Black Rabbit. It’s made clear that Vince is no longer a part of running or owning it in the current timeline, as he is off gambling and straight-up murdering a dude with a car. Yes, this happens, but somehow never comes back to haunt him. Seriously, he runs over a dude with a vehicle in a coin deal gone wrong, but nobody ever comes looking for him. Seems his stakes lie elsewhere. Meanwhile, his younger brother, Jake, is busy upping the restaurant’s cache, but also struggling to keep the place in the black. The restaurant business is tough, as we all know. Even when it looks like things are popping off, the margins can be small. And when you are constantly comping rich people — including your places’ main financial backer and Diddy stand-in, Wes (Sope Dirisu), and his entourage, you’re going to have to maybe, possibly cook the books to make ends meet. So, Jake — who we get is trying to make an earnest go of it — is still doing some shady stuff to keep the place afloat when his deadbeat brother rolls back into town after murdering the aforementioned coin thief. And Vince already has a price on his head — which was the impetus for him leaving NYC to begin with. A deaf loanshark bookie gangster guy hears (or doesn’t hear hear) he’s back in town and calls in his chips. Sending his goons to collect. And things get wacky.
The rest of the series — and I shit you not — is basically spent trying to figure out how Vince will pay off his debt without getting whacked. I believe the number is $140k. Which he assumes his estranged brother might be able to pull out of the restaurant. Issue is, Jake has already cooked the books to the tune of $100k. Oh, okay, they’ll sell their dead mother’s house and Vince’ll use that to pay off the gangster! Nope, the house can’t get a certificate of occupancy because of old wiring and shit! Oh no! Oh, hey, we’ll pull a scam where we pretend to throw a child’s charity at the restaurant and just use the money to pay off Vince’s debt. Dumbest scam ever. Seriously, there is no way they don’t get caught for this. But the writers obviously couldn’t think of anything better. But, no, I think Jake uses that money to pay a down payment on another project he wants to start or something. Uh, let’s just burn down mom’s townhouse for the insurance money. Which they do in the stupidest, most obvious way. Granted, they have some hook-up with the nephew of a fire inspector or something, but Vince literally turns on a space heater, squirts some liquid on the walls and just throws a match. In a connected townhouse! Did they maybe think it would also burn down all the neighbors’ houses? I mean, these are not smart people. Somehow this magically works, he has the money, but for some completely unknown reason the gangsters kind of sort of just don’t accept it. Despite this being the whole impetus for everything. So… Vince then blackmails this other rich guy, who cuts him a check for $500k, I believe. He turns that over to the gangster, but somehow it’s still not good enough? I think. Again, they need to keep the show going, so there is another scam they glom on to that involves $1mm in jewelry that they can heist. And the gangster’s son wants that money too on top of the cash that Vince has already given them already — like four or five times what he owed them. What are we even doing here? The man paid up, why is it still going?
The thing is, we do that whole beginning-with-the-end thing that every single series does now. So we see this jewelry heist go down at the Rabbit right up front. The robbers have masks on, so we know there’s going to be a twist, but it’s a pretty obvious one when you give it two seconds of thought. So all these machinations of Vince paying his debt over and over again, only for it to be pushed forward is necessary just to get us to this heist. A narrative hiccup that was either not considered or written in such a way that they just couldn’t square the circle without some bad tap dancing. To be fair, I don’t think the characters here are supposed to be particularly intelligent. They do fuck up a lot. Shit, they burn down their mom’s house in broad daylight in a crowded neighborhood, just parking right outside, leaving the house, standing there to watch it burn a little and then casually driving off. As if people from all around wouldn’t look out their windows at the crackling and see them standing there slack-jawed. The gangster’s henchmen — one of whom is his son (Forrest Weber) and his son’s keeper (Chris Coy) — are bumbling, coked-up morons for the most part and scary only in their stupidity. They cut off Vince’s pinky at one point — which he seemingly suffers no ill effect from other than having a bandage on his hand for the remainder of the series. Honestly, I’m not sure if he picks up the pinky and has it reattached or if it’s just gone. Only once, right after it happens, does someone ask him what happened to his hand, but it’s never mentioned again. Which you’d think would come up when, say, your adult daughter or just about anyone who knows you, sees your pinky is completely missing. There are just some really poor decisions made all around.
This show is just filled with monologues. Mostly people giving speeches to rooms full of people. Ones that kind of make sense. And others — like the former employee of the Rabbit telling a rapt VIP audience, most of whom already know the story, about how basically Vince caused him to be paralyzed — that would never be allowed to go forward, but for some reason nobody says anything while the person goes on for several minutes. When people aren’t monologuing, there are large chunks of dialogue that are literally “Fuck, fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” and “Shit. Shit, shit. Shit.” I know this specifically because I had captions turned on. And it made me chuckle every time. And it happened a lot. When I wasn’t eye-rolling at this, I was trying to untangle the two main characters. I think Vince is just supposed to be a self-absorbed jerk. He’s constantly blaming everyone else for his poor decisions. And insisting he’s owed something that he forfeited with his bad behavior. Honestly, he’s a real drag. Jake seems like he’s a hard worker and really invested in his staff and his business. But around the edges we learn he slept with every young staffer, embezzled from his own business, lives beyond his means and loves his brother too much? I don’t know, his actions and the way the character acts on screen just doesn’t jibe with the characterization that we hear but don’t see. Sure, he has a nicer apartment than he probably should given the business’ struggles. And stealing money is never good. But everything we see of him on screen seems like he’s focused on the success of the staff and of the business. And is incredibly loyal to his brother, despite his many faults. Never do we see him leering at the young barmaid or being a creep. He seems like a good co-parent to his aspiring-dancer teen son and has a generally decent relationship with his ex-wife, Val (Dagmara Domińczyk). And who can fault a dude for being loyal to a fuck-up brother? I don’t know, there’s some disconnect here that I just couldn’t figure out.
I just can’t wrap my head around what felt so off with this thing. The acting is generally decent. Bateman’s range has never been terrific, but his scraggly beard does a lot of the heavy lifting in making him seem like a scumbag. Domińczyk is a throw-away character, unfortunately. And the whole deaf gangster is an interesting touch, but watching scene after scene of him signing and having people voice what he’s signing gets tiring after a while. The whole thing just felt repetitive and wheel-spinning. Too much smokey atmosphere and not enough propulsion. Too many of the same conversations. And certainly too much can-kicking with the whole Vince-paying-his-debt deal. It’s honestly a bit infuriating as the goalposts keep moving. When it comes down to it, this should have been six, not eight, episodes and the plotting needed to be much tighter and the characters less broadly drawn. I think they thought they had a bunch of mysteries that were revealed in ah-ha moments that would help identify and clarify all these things, but they only served to ask: why couldn’t this meeting have been an email?
