John Powers

If you ask the psychologists, they'll tell you that humor is a defense mechanism, a buffer between ourselves and the painfulness of reality.

I'm not sure that's actually true.

I think of laughter as something transcendent.

But I have to admit that the world has gotten so alarming that I'd rather watch something funny than the news.

I laughed a whole lot watching Big Mistakes, a new half-hour Netflix crime comedy from Dan Levy of Schitt's Creek fame, who co-created the series with Rachel Sennett.

Set in a fictional New Jersey city, this story about an offbeat family that finds itself entangled with the mob is a wild and woolly inversion of Schitt's Creek.

where that much adored show started out cartoonish and grew warmer and more humane.

Big Mistake starts as a frolic, then morphs into a farce that grows more than a little hellish.

Laurie Metcalf stars as Linda, a histrionic single mother of three who's running for mayor with guidance from her favorite child, Natalie.

That's Abby Quinn, who has the smug, small-souled efficiency of a political operative.

She clings to her mother's side like a barnacle.

Things are more fraught with Linda's other kids.

Levy plays Nicky, a fussy, anxious, closeted gay minister who hides his boyfriend from his parishioners.

Nicky is forever bickering with his sister Morgan.

That's Taylor Ortega, a chaos-inducing schoolteacher with a real mouth on her.

She's got a puppyish boyfriend she doesn't adore.

When Linda orders Nicky and Morgan to get some jewelry for their dying grandmother, they commit a small, foolish crime that crazily leaves them beholden to mobsters.

Even as they try to deal with everyday life, their grandmother's funeral, their mother's campaign, Sunday sermons, they're forced to do laughably dodgy missions that take them from strip clubs and cattle auctions to prisons and private jets.

While all this has Nicky positively hissing with panic, Morgan digs the excitement, even growing attracted to a Turkish crook, played by Boran Kuzum, whose presence may make you think of the film Anora.

Here, Nicky's in a tizzy because he's being tailed by a gangster and shows up at his mother's front door in the pouring rain.