Dan Levy has credited two major long-running crime dramas for inspiring his latest hit, Big Mistakes.
Released on Netflix in April, the eight-episode series was co-created by Levy and Rachel Sennott. It stars Levy alongside Taylor Ortega as two deeply incompetent siblings who are blackmailed into the world of organized crime. Laurie Metcalf also features as Levy’s mom.
While Levy, 42, went into Big Mistakes determined to make it “radically different” from his Emmy-winning comedy Schitt’s Creek, he still faced challenges.
“Writing crime every day is so much harder than anyone ever thought, certainly than I thought,” he said on a new episode of Entertainment Weekly’s The Awardist podcast.
“I give all the credit in the world to NCIS and Law & Order,” he noted of the popular police procedurals.
“It’s been so fun writing crime,” he continued. “And then balancing that crime with comedy is this added element of challenge that has just been the greatest education.”
Levy revealed that to keep the series grounded in reality, the team consults a “crime expert” to go over “every crime-related incident, every response that we have to the crime, the plausibility of it, who would be in the room, who would be handling it, what are the tiers of the crime that we’re dealing with.”
“And everything so far in the show has been actual criminal acts that have happened in real life. As insane as that sounds,” he said, adding that their crime consultant is an “expert in the world of organized crime.”
“He has an unlimited database of stories, information, knowledge on so many different worlds of organized crime, but predominantly mafia-related stuff. And it’s been fascinating.”
Big Mistakes is Levy’s second original scripted series after Schitt’s Creek, which he also starred in alongside his father and co-creator Eugene Levy, the late Catherine O’Hara and Annie Murphy. It ran for six seasons from 2015 to 2020 and won nine Emmy Awards.
In April, Levy shot down the possibility of a Schitt’s Creek sequel in the wake of O’Hara’s death at the age of 71.
“No. We can’t,” he said in an interview with CBS News. “I was thinking about it. It’s tough going back.”
On the privilege of working with O’Hara and Metcalf, Levy said on The Awardaist: “It’s really been the great joy of my life to work opposite these women and to write for them and to write characters for them that are challenging, hopefully, and exciting and sexy and kind of against type, against what someone over 60 years old would normally see cross their desk.
“Continuing to challenge Catherine and Laurie [has] made me a better writer, and it’s definitely made me a better actor.”
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