Flatbush Misdemeanors, Showtime’s dark, underrated comedy that tracks the interconnected lives of working-class Brooklyn residents, isn’t flashy, relying instead on a lackadaisical, slice-of-life pace of humor. The concept is simple: Flatbush follows two hapless friends, Dan and Kevin (played by co-creators Dan Perlman and Kevin Iso), who—like everyone else in their orbit—are striving to make it but constantly sliding back to where they started. And its low-key, rambling approach to this down-to-earth, relatable concept is what makes this unique show one of the best comedies on TV. “I’ve laughed harder than I’ve ever laughed with no money in my pocket,” Iso says. “It is a mundane—or people are calling it a ‘working-class comedy’—but I feel like it’s just more interesting to see people not make it than it is to see them make it.”
Perlman and Iso portray unflattering versions of themselves in Flatbush Misdemeanors, which made the jump to Showtime last spring after originating as a web series in 2017. “Dan” and “Kevin” are longtime friends whose marginal existences are upended when Kevin, a struggling artist, accidentally spills $3,000 worth of lean when delivering food to the comically indefatigable drug-dealer, Drew, played by The Wire’s Hassan Johnson. (A close-up of the bottle tumbling over into Drew’s sink symbolizes the main characters’ lives going down the drain.) Now indebted to Drew, Kevin is strong-armed into bringing him free food from the roti shop that he works at, while Dan, a feckless high school teacher, is forced to give Drew’s niece, Zayna (Kristin Dodson), preferential treatment at school.
While their attempts to evade Drew provide the show with a humorous throughline, it’s not the full extent of Flatbush. The show is also about Dan and Kevin’s attempts to improve their lives that keep careening into roadblocks. In the just-completed season 2, Kevin gets accepted into an art fellowship—which turns out to be a patronizing, exploitative program called “No Negro Left Behind.” Meanwhile, Dan joins NA to address his Xanax addiction—only to have his nemesis, Drew, coincidentally show up at the same meetings. (The exasperated “This motherfucker” looks they exchange at their first meeting together are perfect.)
Johnson is exceptional as Drew, simultaneously hilarious and intimidating. Flatbush Misdemeanors cashes in on the idea that most viewers will recognize him from his performance as the enforcer Wee-Bey on The Wire. Much like his work on that series, Johnson’s delivery is his secret weapon—he makes Drew funny even though he’s not cracking jokes. “Fuck, nigga gonna tell me he ain’t gonna front me ‘til my beard connect,” he tells his associate, Blue (Napoleon Emill), when Drew’s attempt to establish a new drug connection in Philly fails because he can’t measure up to the city’s renowned beard culture. Says Perlman, “[Johnson’s] like a comic in the sense that he has a very honed idea of his voice, he’s so precise, and he could say, ‘Drink this healthy soda’ or ‘I’m gonna kill you’ with the exact same inflection where it’s equally funny and believable.” Johnson can sell the two sides of Drew: That he might beat the shit out of Kevin and Dan (or worse)… and also seriously consider selling NFTs as a way to go legit. Over time, he becomes more of an acquaintance than a boogeyman.
The show’s world has organically expanded, with new side characters introduced as a result of Kevin spilling Drew’s lean. There’s Desmond (Joshua J. Williams), for example, who scams people into buying fake Nets tickets by photoshopping himself into pictures with outspoken stars Kevin Durant and Kyrie Irving. Or Zayna’s friend Amaya (Angella Katherine), who’s more concerned with her role in the school play and Zayna’s budding relationship with Desmond than anything going on with Dan. “I love that there are characters that don’t think about our characters that much, except for when they run into them,” Perlman says. “We’re not terribly important to them; their relationship to us is not the most important thing to them. That feels like New York to me: We slam into each other, we step on each other, we’re in each other’s way and it’s annoying. Sometimes we get along with each other, sometimes we don’t.”
Flatbush is far more meandering and relaxed than more traditionally-structured comedies like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia or South Side. For all of the drama in Dan and Kevin’s lives, neither are prone to dramatic displays of…anything. The show doesn’t rely on rapid-fire jokes; Iso and Perlman understand that every scene doesn’t need to be funny. Season 2’s second episode focuses on Kevin’s temporary return home to Louisiana, and features a long stretch with hardly any jokes at all as he struggles to readjust to life in his parents’ house. This long, expository spell makes its eventual, natural comic payoff all the more rewarding. “For people to really laugh at something, you’re gonna have to believe what you had seen before,” Iso says. “So I think the comedy comes when it’s supposed to come and then with anything else, it’s like: ‘Just live in it and let it be what it is.’”
Flatbush never preaches, but it doesn’t shy from sly social critique. Kevin’s No Negro Left Behind fellowship is a sharp jab at creative spaces built by white people under the guise of uplifting Black culture—but they’re really only seeking a digestible form of Blackness that can be packaged and sold. (Bonus: It assuages the leaders’ own white guilt by doing the bare, ultimately harmful, minimum.) No Negro Left Behind’s parasitic white director, Nancy (Succession’s Zoe Winters), frames her assignments with hollow buzzwords like “defiance” and “authenticity” that envision Blackness purely on her own narrow-minded terms. She’s as horny for her vision of “authenticity” as she is for a Morris Chestnut picture that she talks to and caresses. “I think white people who act like Nancy are funny because they can look at that and laugh at it, and then they can go back to work and do it again,” Iso says with a laugh. “‘She’s so crazy!’ Yeah, but that’s you.”
Flatbush Misdemeanors’ unrushed, idiosyncratic rhythms organically parallel the feel of life in Flatbush, demonstrating how funny and illuminating it is when dashes of absurdity punctuate periods of tedium or ennui. “It’s everybody’s little indiscretions or whatever that end up spiraling, adding up, and, in totality, causing problems,” Perlman says. That’s what the title means, that’s the fount of the humor, and that’s why the show stands out, even with a smaller footprint.