Ever thought The Bear could use less R.E.M. and more violent gun crime? The latest high-end, high-stakes restaurant drama is far better than it sounds on paper – with Jude Law and Jason Bateman playing brothers mixed up in organised crime, bad debts and a struggling food business. Ignore the comparisons to other shows and stick with it through a slow start, and you’ll find a tough, grown-up New York thriller with more than enough of its own edge.
Law is Jake Friedkin, ex-rockstar and new owner of a hip Brooklyn nightspot. The Black Rabbit is exactly the sort of cool venue that RAYE uses for a benefit gig ( Episode 4) and where The Strokes’ Albert Hammond Jr just hangs out (Episode 6). Yes, cocktails cost a fortune and the waitresses are all doing coke with art dealers, rappers and video producers. In other words, the place is swimming in money – which makes it a terrible place for Jake’s deadbeat brother Vince (Bateman) to wash back up.
He’s back in town to leech off his brother, of course, but Vince quickly falls back into step with other old grudges, bigger debts and with the daughter he never sees. By Episode 2 he’s missing a pinkie and Jake now has his restaurant on the line as collateral with the local gang boss (CODA’s Oscar-winning Troy Kotsur).
Spread across eight hour-long episodes and handled by four different directors, Black Rabbit runs more like a novel than a series. Writer Zach Baylin returns to work with Law after 2024’s underrated The Order, a film directed by Justin Kurzel who picks up the last (and best) two episodes here. Bateman himself directs the first two before handing the reins over to his Ozark co-star Laura Linney and that show’s sometime director, Ben Semanoff. If everyone knows each other’s shorthand, it shows. Black Rabbit takes its time to build slowly before using every inch of the elbow room to pack in a breathless, emotional action finale that’s deliberately eclipsed by the weight of its family drama.
There are strong flecks of Breaking Bad, Fargo, Killing Them Softly and Uncut Gems in the writing, and the beautiful whisky-hued cinematography deserves a lot of credit. But the show is really all about Law and Bateman’s performances. Seeming slightly mis-cast for half of the run (apparently, they didn’t know which brother they were each going to play when they started developing it), watching them both slowly climb out their comfort zone to play Jake and Vince is ultimately what makes Black Rabbit work so well.
Too bleak to make the oddly funny tone feel right, too slow to not let the violence jar and too laser focussed for literally everyone else’s stories (affairs, sexual abuse, suicides and murders) not to look like background filler, Jake and Vince are big enough here for everything else to not really matter.
Awkwardly told across eight episodes instead of one smaller film or one much bigger series, Black Rabbit nevertheless has something to offer that most other shows don’t: proper, old-fashioned character work wrapped up in a sharp, no-nonsense thriller that bothers to take its time.
‘Black Rabbit’ is streaming on Netflix now