John Powers

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.

When are we locking the door?

You tell me.

Now, it's hardly groundbreaking for a comedy to throw ordinary people into the shark-infested waters of crime.

Yet what matters in pop culture is less originality than verve and commitment.

Although Big Mistakes isn't about much of anything, and the gangster plot is wantonly implausible, it revels in its amusingly awkward situations and clever, fetchy dialogue.

Big Mistakes makes being frantic funny in a way that another new show, The Audacity, does not.

Levy gives his all as Nicky, whose body language betrays emotional blockage, but whose face is a menagerie of stressed-out tics and grimaces.

A sincere man of God, the show respects religious faith, he's a good, orderly person who's easily driven crazy by those who aren't orderly or good.

This means he's perfectly paired with Morgan.

She's the sort of shoot-from-the-hip troublemaker I usually find annoying.

But here, in a career-making performance, Ortega gives their scenes a real zing.

Her run-amok charm plays perfectly off Levy's tension.

They drive each other bats, as only family can.

In a way, each embodies a side of their mother.

It's another memorable role for Metcalf, an astonishingly gifted comedian whose wildly expressive face can, in a microsecond, go from a comedy mask to a tragedy mask and back again.

Herlinda is the show's best character, a self-made woman who's at once principled, hardworking, sexually open, and not a little loopy.