The Black Rabbit is the kind of Manhattan restaurant that invariably gets described as a clubhouse. Nestled in the armpit where FDR Drive meets the Brooklyn Bridge, the fictional multi-story establishment that gives the Netflix thriller Black Rabbit its title boasts a historic location, a killer menu, a celebrity co-owner, decor that splits the difference between shabby chic and bohemian louche, and a fashionable clientele that treats its VIP room like a second home. As its proprietor, the charismatic former rock frontman Jake Friedken (executive producer Jude Law), explains to the crowd assembled there for a trunk show of high-end jewelry, this is “a place where the night could go anywhere.” Almost immediately, it does. A pair of masked thieves burst into the party, thrusting guns in people’s faces and demanding the jewels.
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After this stylish and energetic intro, Black Rabbit takes viewers back in time a month to trace the convoluted origins of a robbery that raises some pressing questions—why, for instance, do the perpetrators have a key to the restaurant’s padlocked gate?—and is still in progress when the show cuts away from it. The trouble seems to begin when Jake’s ne’er-do-well older brother, Vince (played by executive producer Jason Bateman, who also directed the first two episodes), returns to the city after a stint in Reno that ends with him running over a guy who tried to steal the rare coins he was selling out of a casino parking lot. Given how much money and anxiety Vince has cost him over the years, it’s tough to understand why hard-working, put-together Jake would not just pay for his plane ticket home, but also welcome him back behind the Rabbit’s bar.
The foundation of their complicated relationship, even more than the story behind the opening set piece, is the show’s animating mystery. When it stays focused on its two leads—and especially when they’re playing off each other—Black Rabbit, which arrives on Sept. 18, can be riveting. But the choice creators Zach Baylin (King Richard, Creed III) and Kate Susman make to overload their scripts with plot instead of using that time to deepen the story’s many secondary characters flattens the brothers’ world. Though it was shot on location, this New York is a city of dated archetypes that might have carried a feature but can’t sustain an eight-hour series.
You can see why Bateman and Law would be excited enough about this project to want to throw their weight behind it as producers. Their roles are cool as well as meaty—the kind that even male actors might struggle to find once they reach their 50s. Native New Yorkers who grew up in working-class Coney Island, the Friedkens escaped a chaotic household to become stars of the city’s Y2K-era rock revival with their band, the Black Rabbits. (A black-and-white music video of the duo performing their hit, which injects a dose of humor into a show that could use more of it, suggests they were a sort of missing link between Nirvana and the Strokes.) In their heyday, Jake was the pinup, ready to play the part in which the music industry cast him, while drummer Vince was the artist—and the drug-abusing liability. That dynamic has persisted into the present. Before bringing his charm and work ethic to the Rabbit, Jake was managing a famous multihyphenate artist, Wes (Sope Dirisu), who is now a partner in the restaurant. But Vince was the dreamer who saw the potential in a dilapidated space that he would ultimately be too busy drinking, snorting, and gambling away the equity in their family home to help transform.
This dichotomy, the sweaty striver vs. the tortured genius, isn’t exactly novel. So it’s a relief to see Baylin and Susman complicate it, challenging our expectations by capitalizing on the sinister smarm baked into Law’s signature performances and the core of embattled decency that’s still palpable beneath Bateman’s Cousin Itt makeover. What seems at first like it might be miscasting, especially of Bateman, evolves into an understanding that there’s more good in Vince, more rotten in Jake, and more gray area in their symbiotic relationship than either we or they realize. (The script is not subtle on this, or any other, point. “He’s an addict, too,” one character says of Jake. “What’s he f-ckin’ addicted to?” asks another. The reply: “His brother.”)
One trait the brothers share is that they’re both terrible with money. Despite his prosperous posturing, Jake is scrambling just to pay the Rabbit’s vendors, let alone scrape together the funds to pursue a new opportunity at the Four Seasons’ iconic Pool Room. And Vince’s return to New York is immediately clocked by Junior (Forrest Weber) and Babbitt (Chris Coy), callow gangsters who lent him a huge sum that he neglected to repay before going west. Which makes Black Rabbit the kind of thriller that derives its pressure from the protagonists’ desperation to raise an impossible amount of cash in an unfeasibly short period. Jake’s reputation and livelihood are at stake. For Vince, what hangs in the balance isn’t just his own life; his creditors are also threatening his semi-estranged daughter, a tattoo artist named Gen (Odessa Young).
Whether a get-money-fast plot comes across as a tired trope or as the reinvention of a classic depends on execution; in Black Rabbit, it’s a little of both. A clubby restaurant makes a novel setting for such intrigue, even if the Rabbit feels more like a relic of pre-pandemic—if not pre-Great Recession—New York nightlife than a spot that could really exist today. Yet the serialized structure requires the Friedkens to nearly save themselves before nose-diving into a new mess so many times, it gets repetitive. When we finally glimpse the formative moments of their relationship, the timing of that revelation suggests an arbitrary desire to withhold them until the last two episodes more than it serves the needs of a story that could’ve used those details.
But the real missed opportunity is the failure to give the dozen-plus characters around the Friedkens much personality or purpose outside of what they do to help or hinder, inspire or threaten or tug on the heartstrings of Jake and Vince. Jake has an ex and a son… and an electric connection with Wes’ wife, Estelle (Cleopatra Coleman), who designed the restaurant. Vince has his skeevy associates. The Rabbit is its own world, populated by an ambitious chef (Amaka Okafor) and her loyal right hand (Robin de Jesus), along with several front-of-house employees. It’s always a pleasure to see The Gilded Age star Morgan Spector, but his poorly defined role here seems to exist purely for the purposes of tying up loose plot threads.
All of these characters are short on interiority—which, among other problems, makes a storyline involving an influential customer who likes to drug and take advantage of young, female servers feel a bit exploitative. It says something, too, about the generic, expository nature of the dialogue that the only performance on the same level as Bateman’s and Law’s is a silent one from CODA Oscar winner Troy Kotsur. He plays Junior’s father, Joe, an exacting but also fiercely loving deaf crime boss who has a long history with the Friedken family.
Black Rabbit is worth watching for its stylish direction (Bateman’s fellow Ozark alum Laura Linney helms two episodes), propulsive pace that mitigates some of the narrative wheel-spinning, and most of all Law and Bateman’s brilliantly cast brother act. But technical polish and the faithful execution of genre conventions alone can’t elevate a show beyond competence. In its own terms, Black Rabbit is a workmanlike Jake, not a visionary Vince.