Sebastian Maniscalco’s ‘Bookie’ Is a Good Reminder of Why the Antihero Era Ended

Doing business with a man who made billions on child labor and may have murdered a past associate. Jokes about children being sexually abused in the foster system. Extreme and public intimate partner violence played for laughs because both partners are men. Though you might think plotlines like these went extinct circa Entourage and Sons of Anarchy, Bookie is doing its best to revive the antihero era. Sometimes it feels like a charmingly retro throwback; mostly it’s so sweaty and off-putting that it reminds you why they don’t make TV like this anymore.

Bookie, which premiered on Max late last November, was co-created by superstar EP Chuck Lorre and his frequent collaborator Nick Bakay, and wildly successful stand-up comic Sebastian Maniscalco stars as Danny, the titular bookie. Though some lip service is paid to the fact of legalized sports betting and how it could affect Danny’s business, he’s mostly doing well. In the penultimate episode of the first season, we learn that his operation cleared nearly $4 million on the Super Bowl alone. He does suffer some calamities — Danny’s late mentor’s failson demanding that Danny kick up the same percentage he had to his dad; one of Danny’s underlings leading a platoon of Russian goons to Danny’s house to rob him, requiring Danny to pay dirty cop Carl (Toby Huss) $1 million to create a pretext for shooting up the Russians’ van — but these seem like the kinds of occupational hazards any shady business might encounter, with or without a government-approved competitor in place. Even a finale cliffhanger in which Danny’s wife Sandra (Andrea Anders) leaves him over his refusal to consider moving back to Las Vegas and get a straight job running a casino sports book feels like a dispute they’ve probably had at least once before.

The Season Two finale ended on Danny heading to Modesto to collect Sandra and Danny’s stepson Anthony (Maxim Swinton) from Sandra’s mother’s place, which turns out to be in a trailer park. Refreshingly, the show actually reflects recent headlines about scandalous price-gouging in mobile home parks by… Just kidding, it plays into dated stereotypes. When Danny leaves his car next to a “no parking” sign and gets scolded by a resident, he yells back, “Get some teeth!” The driver who comes to tow Danny’s car has both a hook in place of one hand and an electrolarynx  — or, as Danny later calls it, a “cancer kazoo.” 

Sandra’s mother Wendy (Dale Dickey) also lives down to prejudices about mobile home residents, telling Danny that Anthony is playing video games with a “simpleton” neighbor; that might not be the first word she’d reach for, but she says Sandra gets mad at her when she uses an even more offensive one. Danny and Sandra don’t resolve their conflict literally at all, though the decision that Wendy will come live with them for an undefined length of time seems like Sandra’s slow-burn punishment for Danny’s refusal to consider her feelings. 

Elsewhere, Danny’s business partner Ray (Omar Dorsey) achieves his goal of renting a lavish Brentwood mansion for his beloved Grandma (Arnetia Walker), just in time for it to become a makeshift care home for her new husband John “Frank” Franklin (Brent Jennings) following his stroke. Danny’s other partner, his sister Lorraine (Vanessa Ferlito), continues covertly running her shroom therapy business with Hector (Jorge Garcia), pulling in Danny’s associate Walt (Rob Corddry) to help them scale up.

After watching the entire series to date — including all eight episodes of Season Two, which premieres on Thursday — my problems with the series premiere apply to the show as a whole: it’s an issue of taste. I understand that when you’re making a show about the underworld figures whose illegal business exists to serve degenerate gamblers, their conversations aren’t going to sound like the break room at Vassar’s Sociology department. 

For this reason, for example, I’m fine with the second season premiere opening with a California Highway Patrolman (Eric Allan Kramer) casually guessing that Danny, whom he’s just pulled over for speeding, doesn’t trust the banks with the huge duffel bag of cash in his trunk because of “the Jews”: California law enforcement has a documented reputation for corruption, and Bookie’s commitment to making every cop look like a complete scumbag is an artistic choice I wholeheartedly support. I even think it makes both character and dramatic sense for Danny to play along with the patrolman’s bigotry in order to exit the interaction as a free man. Where the scene loses me is when Danny calls back “We will not be replaced!” to the patrolman when he has sold himself as a sympathizer and they’re both returning to their vehicles. (Not to mention that’s not even the slogan, though maybe the idea is not to give more oxygen to the real one.)

The show has also repeatedly insisted that, despite pop-cultural portrayals, Danny and Ray don’t actually break clients’ kneecaps when they can’t or won’t pay their debts. It’s definitely more compelling for the viewer to see the creative solutions clients come up with, like the USC “frat fuck” who robs a few pieces of jewelry from “Mommy #3”; and more funny to see how it blows back on Danny and Ray, like when the frat fuck’s dad enlists Carl to get it back from them, and we see a montage of the bookies shamefacedly asking to take it back from the various women they gifted it to. So given that Danny’s day-to-day business is more about calculating risks and cutting losses, Season Two’s uptick in murder as a punchline feels lazy — particularly when a brand-new character is introduced just to be dispatched for an off-screen gag. 

But nothing is lazier than the show’s casual racism: In a single very efficient scene, we get Wendy telling Sandra she’ll be grateful to live near a cop the next time “the Blacks riot,” and Danny unfavorably comparing Sandra to Carl’s new, barely English-fluent, very docile mail-order bride: “She even bows. The only time you bow is when I drop money on the floor.”

Last year, I said Bookie was almost good. And it still almost is! The supporting cast is uniformly great, including guest stars. Zach Braff pops in for a very funny one-off; Ray Romano returns, even further down on his luck than he was in the pilot’s cold open; and playing “himself” here is the most watchable Charlie Sheen has been in years. Jennings and Kramer should be in their seventh season of Lodge 49, but since we live in a universe where a show that good could only get two, I’ll just try to be happy they’re still getting work. For all his posturing as a tough guy, Danny is actually a softy; one of the funniest scenes of the season is when Sandra tries to get him to talk dirty, but changes her mind when the best he can come up with is “I’m so mad at your pussy I wanna MESS IT UP!” Lorraine and Hector’s storyline is just one that dramatizes the potential dangers of trusting the wrong people to help operate your illegal business; that’s the kind of thing you want to dig in on when you make a show like this, where the majority of your viewers have no direct knowledge of the subject matter — at least, I hope they don’t, because it makes both betting and running a book seem pretty bad. 

There’s at least one solid laugh in each episode, but when each episode also contains at least five cheap shots, it’s kind of impossible to endorse it. There’s a reason we left the antihero era behind; I guess Lorre and Maniscalco haven’t heard.