It’s always been Prestige TV’s inclination to dip into darker material and gritty violence, but lately there’s been a tendency to spill over into pure misery in the spirit of pushing boundaries. Such is the case with Netflix’s Black Rabbit, an 8-episode dirge of daddy issues, thwarted masculinity, and poor decision making. It’s not so much that the narrative is particularly unpleasant and more that the characters are just endlessly, pointlessly stupid, and watching them inexplicably dig themselves deeper scene after scene becomes almost immediately tiresome.
Jude Law is Jake, who runs a restaurant called Black Rabbit (hey that’s the name of the show!), which is also named after the one-hit-wonder band he once had with his brother Vince (Jason Bateman), an endless fuckup and con artist who reinserts himself into Jake’s life as he tries to hide out after accidentally killing a guy during a deal gone wrong (a murder that goes completely unmentioned from then on and has no further consequences). Whoops, turns out Vince also owes a bunch of money to local gangster Macuso (Troy Kotsur, giving the one standout performance here), and it’s only a matter of time before everything unravels from there.
Between Vince’s various scams and Jake’s scrambling to cover up his own moral infractions (like a potential rapist that happens to be a regular at the restaurant) while endlessly indulging his dirtbag brother, there’s precious little room for anything other than a slowly teased out slide into the inevitable. And while the clearly indicated Only Way Out Of This finale serves the show’s narrative and thematic purposes, it also reveals a secret between the siblings that renders Jake, ostensibly the “good brother,” into a self-serving monster who could have righted this ship ages ago if only he’d had an ounce of empathy. Ultimately the entire project collapses under the weight of miserablism.
CREATORS: Zach Baylin, Kate Susman; CAST: Jude Law, Jason Bateman, Cleopatra Coleman, Troy Kotsur; DISTRIBUTOR: Netflix; STREAMING: September 18; EPISODES: 8
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