‘Black Rabbit’ Review: Jude Law and Jason Bateman Lead Netflix’s Blandly Bleak Antihero Drama
TV’s Golden Age of the ’00s was built on the backs of antiheroes like Tony Soprano, Walter White, Don Draper, Dexter Morgan and Al Swearengen.
But antiheroes are not forever, and the landscape became clogged with antihero shows that started strong and lost the thread (Sons of Anarchy); antihero shows that felt like soulless copies of previous antihero shows (Ozark); and antihero shows that felt like parodies of previous antihero shoes (Low Winter Sun).
Last year, my Top 10 list contained only one show, Netflix‘s deconstructed take on Ripley, centered on an antihero and, as we head into the fall of 2025, the antihero landscape is feeling dire. From the repetitive tropes of Taylor Sheridan’s flotilla of thinly sketched western archetypes to the latest near-literal resurrections of Dexter Morgan, I don’t have antihero fatigue so much as fatigue with shows that don’t understand why Breaking Bad and The Sopranos were great — cake-and-eat-it-too shows that think the next evolution of the genre can be found in hollow redemption for poor behavior.
Fast on the heels of HBO’s relentlessly bleak Task, which made me yearn for the humor and warmth that scaffolded the bleakness in creator Brad Ingelsby’s Mare of Easttown, comes Zach Baylin and Kate Susman’s relentlessly bleak eight-episode Netflix limited series Black Rabbit, which made me yearn for the humor and warmth of human characters and narrative logic (and the religious/philosophical underpinnings that Task employed to at least tenuously justify its redemptive arc).
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There are parts of Black Rabbit that I appreciated, from a ground-level New York City vitality to a searing supporting performance from Troy Kotsur to a two-episode conclusion that’s effectively tense, right up until a soggy ending that left me convinced the series has no awareness that its main characters aren’t antiheroes, they just suck in very conventionally clichéd ways.
Black Rabbit begins in medias res with an audacious jewelry robbery at a loud, underlit bash at the Brooklyn eatery that gives the show its name. We’re introduced to owner Jake (Jude Law), genius chef Roxie (Amaka Okafor), well-dressed investor Wes (Sope Dirisu) and a few other background figures from the restaurant. Then the robbery goes bad, as such robberies often do.
A month earlier, we’re reintroduced to Jake before the series heads across the country to meet his black sheep brother, Vince (Jason Bateman, also the director of the first two episodes, if the dim lighting weren’t already clue enough), loitering at a Reno casino. Vince is about to sell a book of rare coins, but the deal goes bad, as such deals often do. In the process of the deal going bad, Vince presumably kills a man with his car, but since it’s never mentioned again during the course of the series, he’s allowed to be treated as a lovable rascal.
Fleeing the murder that will never be mentioned again, Vince retreats back to New York and finds Jake anxiously awaiting the review from The New York Times that he’s certain will kickstart the fortunes of Black Rabbit; while Black Rabbit gives very little impression of knowing anything about the restaurant industry, it absolutely gives the impression of having been made by people who watched the third season of The Bear (and Uncut Gems and Ozark, over-represented in the DNA with Bateman, early director Laura Linney, composers Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans and cutesy animated credits teasing the content of each episode).
Vince’s tattoo artist daughter (Odessa Young’s Gen) wants nothing to do with him. His brother doesn’t want to lend him money or relive the good ole days when they were part of a rock band that had one small hit. Plus, Vince owes a lot of money to vicious bad guy Joe Mancuso (Kotsur) — I’m truly not sure if he’s a bookie, a mobster, a money-lender or if it matters — and Mancuso’s screw-up son Junior (Forrest Weber) and Junior’s slightly less inept partner (Chris Coy’s Babbit … yes, he’s Babbit on Black Rabbit) are determined to make him pay up. It’s not a spoiler that Jake gets embroiled in his brother’s mess, nor that while Vince is the family black sheep, Jake is a screw-up himself in ways that are much less innocuous and much more reprehensible than the show thinks they are.
(Note: In a better version of this show, Vince and Jake spend the third episode bingeing Girls5eva, allowing them to realize that the best way to repay Vince’s debt and for Vince to reconnect with his daughter is a reunion of their band, which was also called Black Rabbit. OK, that’s not a better version of the show, but it’s a version that takes things in a somewhat different direction than you might otherwise predict, which is not the case with the actual version of the show.)
In order to make Vince and Jake sympathetic as characters — Vince, I’ll remind you, probably killed a man, while Jake is involved in an active cover-up of multiple sexual assaults at his restaurant — Black Rabbit takes an approach familiar from many second-rate antihero shows: It makes the more morally righteous characters too boring and one-dimensional to count as heroes, and the less morally righteous characters too cartoonish to count as people.
The ensemble is littered with characters who seem important, but receive, at most, one trait or piece of backstory. Brilliant chef Roxie has an ex-girlfriend in one scene. Roxie’s kitchen buddy Tony (Robin de Jesús) is just Roxie’s buddy. Estelle (Cleopatra Coleman) has an unspecified genius for interior design and is torn between Jake and Wes, who is apparently a famous musician because he knows Raye (Raye, in a pointless cameo). Jake has an ex-wife (Dagmara Domińczyk) who has family money and a son (Michael Cash) who likes dance. There are roughly a half-dozen other people who mill about the restaurant; the show assumes we know who they are, which isn’t the same as writing characters for a single one of them.
On the cartoon-ish villain side, Junior and Babbit are motivated to do dumb things under the universal cover of “daddy issues,” but Weber at least has a scary intensity. As a smooth fixer for a tertiary monster who has maybe three lines, Morgan Spector is both chilling and thoroughly pointless.
That brings me to Kotsur, who appears onscreen and instantly pulls attention from absolutely everything else. Since his CODA Oscar win, Kotsur’s opportunities have been insufficient, but I’d like to hope that writers and casting directors look at what he does here with nothing even resembling a role. He’s terrifying and heartbreaking at once, adding a sense of gravity and empathy each time he appears, which is probably for 15 minutes total in the entire series.
While TV’s antihero definition expanded to include the likes of Damages‘ Patty Hewes and Scandal‘s Oliva Pope, it feels like we’re having a representational regression as to which antiheroes get their stories told. I have no doubt that a limited series about a deaf crime lord dealing with a disappointing son and two pissant restaurateurs would be far better than Black Rabbit — just as both Smoke and Dexter: Resurrection should have been about Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine’s characters, and Thuso Mbedu character ought to lead Task.
It isn’t that Bateman and Law are bad, exactly. Bateman commits to his character’s wiry unruliness and makes Vince into a self-destructive twit, which is probably by intent. The show still tries to suggest Vince has fast-talking charm, a contention not supported by his dialogue. The scripts honestly don’t have a clue who Jake is, and Law’s performance is thoroughly unfocused, if emotionally persuasive at moments. The two actors spend almost eight hours yelling at each other sanctimoniously, which is both a believable interpretation of a sibling relationship and really boring after a while.
After six hours of mistakes, misadventures, indifferent torture and even more indifferent murder, Black Rabbit finally locks in for 90 minutes in the homestretch as the last two episodes become a breathless pursuit through various parts of Brooklyn. Justin Kurzel, who worked with Law on The Order, directed these installments and builds a bruising sense of tension weaving around locations that were better used in Anora, but still add well-earned authenticity. The last two episodes are also shot largely in the daytime, which means everything is fully visible and properly lit, always a nice treat in a visual medium. Then things just unravel into a half-hour of thoroughly phony mawkishness.
It isn’t that television has outgrown antiheroes entirely, but it takes effort to seek out the uncompromising audacity of Mubi’s Mussolini: Son of the Century. For now, what the big outlets want to give us is bleak cookie-cutter prestige dramas like Black Rabbit, a show and restaurant that offer the empty calories of star power but no nutritional value.
