Dispatch • Dan Levy and the 'Big Mistakes' Cast on Making Crime a Family Affair

Dan Levy doesn’t think he would thrive in a life of crime. He does, however, know why that would be funny.

After the enormous success of Schitt’s Creek, the Emmy-winning writer, producer, and director took time to think about what kind of story he wanted to pour himself into next, if the opportunity allowed. “I really needed to sit and think about what would make me laugh: what was a story that felt like I wanted to tell for many, many, many seasons,” Levy told the room at a Netflix FYSEE event for Big Mistakes held on May 16 in Los Angeles. “Somehow, naturally, I settled on crime, because I thought I would not do well in a criminal situation, which means that that would be funny for a character to be put in.”

He also has what he called an “irrational fear” of being blackmailed. “Don’t you laugh. It could happen! It does,” he added.

So he made a TV show about it.

Big Mistakes, which premiered in April on Netflix, follows two siblings with no natural talent for crime who are dragged, through a chain of increasingly unfortunate choices, into the orbit of organized crime in small-town New Jersey. The inciting object is a necklace. A dying grandmother wants one; her daughter Linda (Laurie Metcalf), who is running for mayor, dispatches two of her three children to find a cheap copy. Nicky (Levy), a gay pastor secretly dating a contractor his congregation can’t know about, and Morgan (Taylor Ortega), a schoolteacher coasting through a relationship, end up at a pawn shop run by a tattooed enforcer named Yusuf (Boran Kuzum). When Yusuf won’t sell the necklace, Morgan takes it anyway. Unfortunately, it belongs to a Russian crime syndicate. Nonna goes into the ground wearing it. The situation, from there, gets funnier and worse.

While the premise sounds like a caper, the show becomes a comedy in which old family habits keep everyone from behaving sensibly for more than five minutes.

Moderated by veteran culture journalist Jim Halterman, the Netflix FYSEE panel brought together Ortega, Jack Innanen, Kuzum, Abby Quinn, and composer Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum, all of whom helped unpack the show's blend of blackmail, bickering, tattoos, family dysfunction, and propulsive music.

What Levy kept returning to wasn’t the crime so much as the family that makes the crime worse. He loves writing about families: the private, embarrassing versions of ourselves that tend to emerge around the people who raised us. He described Big Mistakes as a “celebration of yelling families,” then added that for people raised in calmer houses, it may also be an education in them. The pilot opens on Nonna screaming in a hospital bed, and everything that comes after descends from that sound.

“It is the family tree of what we inherit: good, bad, and ugly,” Levy said.

Given the legacy of Schitt’s Creek, and the fact that Big Mistakes also revolves around a family in crisis, the comparison has followed Levy’s new show. At the panel, he touched on it; he took a different view of the idea that Schitt’s Creek was simply warm from the start. Rewatch the first two seasons, he said, and you’ll find a family that doesn’t say “I love you” to one another until the Season 2 finale. What viewers remember as warmth, he argued, was really tenderness earned slowly, bread-crumbed over time.

Big Mistakes, he suggested, is playing a similar long game, though with more blackmail and fewer artisanal cheeses.

“The more you learn about these people, the more you care,” Levy said. “I’m not going to just give it all away right off the bat.”

Halterman brought up a scene later in the first season in which Linda gets herself into real trouble and all three of her children show up for her. Whatever chaos has unfolded around them, whatever grievance or distance has accumulated, they hear their mother needs them and come running. Halterman said that particular moment moved him; Levy simply described those as the moments when the “light shines through.”

Around Levy’s Nicky, the rest of the ensemble plays different variations on the same family condition: people desperate to be understood and almost pathologically bad at asking for it.

Quinn’s Natalie is, on the surface, the family’s most self-sufficient member: smart, capable, seemingly content to remain a step apart from the chaos her siblings keep making. But underneath that is a person who badly wants to be seen. Quinn described Natalie as someone who acts as if she wants nothing to do with her siblings because she doesn’t know how else to communicate that she wants their respect. The awkward group hug at the end of the season, she said, was the most uncomfortable thing she had ever filmed, which may be exactly why it works.

For Ortega, Morgan represented a character she rarely finds on the page: one she didn’t have to reach for. She described Morgan as a past version of herself, someone at her lowest, with a sourer outlook and less faith in the world. “Then I had one bad week recently, and I was like, she’s there still. She lives within me still,” Ortega said.

It’s not a performance that can be faked, and Ortega wisely doesn’t smooth it down. Morgan’s volatility is funny because it feels alarmingly available to her.

Innanen’s Max occupies a different comic lane: he’s the one character who doesn’t fully know what is happening around him. Innanen described Max as oblivious, while Levy said what made the character work was the warmth Innanen carried into the room during his audition. Max needs to be likable despite his limitations, and Innanen didn’t have to manufacture that.

“He cares so much,” Levy said. “That’s the reason why we like Max, even though he might not be right for her.”

Max senses the emotional chasm opening beneath him without quite being able to explain it. Innanen joked that somewhere deep in the folds of Max’s brain, he can “spider sense” that the relationship is slipping and that maybe, possibly, his girlfriend doesn’t like him very much anymore. Obliviousness, it turns out, is a full-time acting job.

Kuzum’s path to the show was, by his own account, improbable. He was at karaoke in Istanbul when an email arrived from his managers about an audition for an untitled Dan Levy project. Because of the time difference, he came home drunk, saw the message, and decided he was in no shape to process it.

“Is this Dan Levy from Schitt’s Creek?” he remembered thinking. “Okay, I’m too drunk for this.”

He read it again the next day, auditioned over Zoom for the first time, and got the part.

Kuzum spent a decade acting in Turkey and has zero tattoos in real life, which made Yusuf’s snake and skull tattoos both a transformation and a scheduling problem. He had to be among the first on set to have them applied. Levy painted the picture of him in the makeup chair at dawn, sunglasses on, getting fake tattoos applied at speed. For Kuzum’s birthday, everyone on set wore a fake snake tattoo on their neck.

He called the experience a dream come true, and it sounded like he meant it.

Then there was the music. Kroll-Rosenbaum scored the season alongside Canadian electroclash musician Peaches, long known for her provocative electronic sound, bawdy humor, and proudly unsanded edges. Her work was on Levy’s early playlists when he first imagined the show. What drew him to her was specific: a propulsive electronic energy wrapped in wit and self-awareness, a sound that could keep the show moving without stepping on the comedy. Early on, he told Kroll-Rosenbaum and Peaches that he wanted the music to feel like a “heartbeat.”

Kroll-Rosenbaum described the collaboration as joyfully chaotic. “[Peaches] is this person that I’ve respected for so long, and to have the opportunity to jam with her, make music with her, and really get in the weeds with her in a way in the show was amazing,” she explained.

Levy, Kroll-Rosenbaum continued, kept encouraging them to experiment and throw ideas into the sandbox. They layered door slams into the score every time Morgan exits a classroom. They gave different characters their own sonic signatures. She lives largely in post-production while the cast is on set, so the panel was one of the few times she was in a room with all of them. Looking at their faces, she said, she could hear each character’s sound. “I look at all of you, and I’m like: ticking, throbbing. I know what sound I do for each one of you,” she said.

Late in the panel, Levy discussed Season 2, the writing of which is already well underway. He described it as “bigger, bolder, sexier.” The ultimate goal, he said, is to “keep raising the bar” and “keep letting more and more warmth and love into the show” when it feels right. “It is my duty as a writer and an actor to service this unbelievable cast with dialogue and storylines that continue to push them further, continue to challenge them,” he added.

Big Mistakes doesn’t untangle the family knot in one season. It keeps going the way families often do, layering new damage over old love and calling it just another Tuesday. For Levy, that seems to be the idea: the crime keeps the story moving, but family is what makes the chaos worth staying in. The mess, after all, is where the love lives.

Season 1 of Big Mistakes is available to stream on Netflix.