Big Mistakes, the new Netflix comedy co-created by Dan Levy (Schitt’s Creek) and Rachel Sennott (I Love LA), opens with Laurie Metcalf yelling at a dying old lady. Episode one, scene one. It’s the proverbial jump, and Laurie Metcalf is already screaming her fool head off.

“Welp,” this critic wrote in his notebook, “I’m in.”

It may help to know that the tank in which I have long found myself, when it comes to the great Laurie Metcalf portraying a woman feeling her feelings, is miles wide and fathoms deep.

When we meet her, Metcalf’s character Linda is tending to her dying mother, whom she’s convinced is hard of hearing, despite the poor woman’s repeated insistence that she’s not. Linda is in take-charge mode, lovingly(?) hectoring two of her offspring, Nicky (Levy) and Morgan (Taylor Ortega) while heaping praise on her perfect golden child daughter Natalie (Abby Quinn).

In the handful of seconds it takes for this scene to unspool, years of family history reveal themselves in murmured asides and silent glares and frustrated grunts. We quickly learn that Linda is running for mayor of her tiny New Jersey town, and she’s worried about her chances. We learn that she’s disappointed in both Nicky and Morgan, albeit for very different reasons, and that she’s the kind of woman who manages to convince herself that her family is happy and perfect, despite decades of evidence to the contrary.

Nicky, for example, is an uptight pastor who feels compelled to hide his boyfriend (Jacob Gutierrez) from his congregation. Morgan tried to make a go of it as an actor in New York before fizzling out and retreating to her hometown, where she joylessly toils as an elementary school teacher while getting lovebombed by her pathetic lovesick puppy of a high school boyfriend (Jack Innanen).

Taylor Ortega as Morgan and Dan Levy as Nicky.

Spencer Pazer/Netflix

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Nicky and Morgan are wildly unhappy, so when an improbable set of circumstances drags them into the world of organized crime, you’ll be forgiven for wondering if they’re not better off. That’s the sandbox that Big Mistakes sets out to play in, and it works, mostly.

Co-creators Levy and Sennott have made a risky calculation, however. They’re betting that viewers will find the characters of Nicky and Morgan, who bicker ceaselessly throughout the season, caustically funny and recognizably fallible.

And there’s certainly precedent — Levy’s previous extended tenure as creator/star was on Schitt’s Creek, where he also played the uptight queer brother to an irresponsible party-girl sister with whom he frequently clashed. But between Schitt’s Creek‘s first and second seasons, the writers strove to sand down its characters’ edges. From then on, David and Alexis Rose might argue, but they always had each other’s backs. It became a TV relationship that you knew could only ever end in a hug.

Not so Nicky and Morgan. Big Mistakes establishes that there is real gulf stretching between the two characters, one filled with resentment and long-nurtured grudges. I was grateful for that, because it meant that the show was forced to honor it and repeatedly account for it — decades of bitterness couldn’t get waved away by a single act of kindness here or a thoughtful word there, a la Schitt’s Creek, because that’s not how families work. (Later in the season, that yawning gulf does get bridged, but it does so only with the aid of illicit substances, in a hilariously artificial and fleeting way.)

As a result, whenever Nicky and Morgan find themselves in extreme circumstances — which, given the show’s crime-centered narrative, is relatively often — their bickering grows venal, spiteful, petty and mean. Me, I find that funny. But I suspect fans looking to this show for some echoes of Schitt’s Creek‘s doggedly determined warmth and cuddlesomeness will be left cold, possibly even angry.

(The black-hearted villains among you might wonder if, perhaps, Levy witnessed the fandom that metastasized around Schitt’s Creek, which became so much larger than the show he made — remember all that squeeing over Patrick and David? — and thought to himself: Yeah, not that. Let’s make sure not to do that again.) (No? Just me?)

While we’re busting out perfectly unfair comparisons to Schitt’s Creek, let’s close with a biggie. The Laurie Metcalf aspect.

There is a tendency, if you’ve been watching her for decades, to see that Laurie Metcalf’s in a given project and think to yourself, “Well, I mean, it’s Laurie Metcalf. Just wind her up and let her go, and whatever happens will be fun to watch.”

And while that’s true to a certain extent, Metcalf is an actor like any other. She needs to be written for.

Laurie Metcalf as Linda.

Spencer Pazer/Netflix

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I’d argue that what Levy, Sennott and their team of writers are doing for Metcalf on this show is akin to what Levy and co. did for Catherine O’Hara on Schitt’s Creek: They know the actor, they know what she’s capable of delivering, and they’re writing to that capability by giving her the room she needs to absolutely kill it.

In the case of Linda, they give her an outer hardness to play, which is very funny. But they also outfit her with something she desperately wants — to become the mayor — and throw countless circumstances at her to frustrate that want. And while that’s all played for laughs, they also take pains to ground it with a brief, late-season monologue about why she’s seeking an elected office, which only makes it resonate even more.

Metcalf’s already earned four golden Emmy statuettes; she doesn’t need yet another. But that doesn’t change the fact that the work she’s putting in on every episode of Big Mistakes is pure comedy gold.

April may well be “the cruelest month,” as T.S. Eliot famously opined — and even a five-minute doomscroll makes it tough to deny that cruelty is riding at anything but record levels lately. But remember you do have an alternative to doomscrolling, one that’s been around much longer: cracking open a book — or doomflipping, I suppose you could call it.

Don’t get me wrong: The books expected this month don’t exactly radiate escapist good vibes, riddled as they are with anxiety, corruption, unfulfilled desire — even the occasional direct challenge to our notions of reality itself. But they do offer the opportunity to step into someone else’s shoes and get to know their own particular view of our shared world — and sometimes that’s consolation enough. Which is nice, because it may have to be this month.

Transcription, by Ben Lerner (4/7)

The jacket copy of Lerner’s novella is basically a journalist’s stress dream: Commissioned to write what may be the final profile of his mentor, an aging literary icon, Lerner’s narrator fries his only recording device just minutes before the interview by dropping his phone in the sink. What follows is a meditation on memory, art and fatherhood, expressed in a handful of conversations that we’ve got plenty of cause to find unreliable, given the circumstances. As in his previous novels, including The Topeka School, Lerner centers some version of himself in this strangely captivating blend of fiction, memoir and critical essay, shot through with humor and anxiety.

American Fantasy, by Emma Straub (4/7)

Speaking of premises that read like one of my nightmares: Straub’s novel portrays the American Fantasy cruise ship and its themed voyage dedicated to an aging boyband and their loyal superfans — at this point, mostly middle-aged women addled with nostalgia and the looming terrors of menopause. The book bounces between the perspectives of a reluctant attendee, a band member and the boat’s hypercompetent event director, who really doesn’t deserve this. It’s infused with a blend of bemused humor and abiding sympathy familiar to readers of Straub’s previous novels, All Adults Here and This Time Tomorrow.

London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth, by Patrick Radden Keefe (4/7)

In Keefe’s previous book Say Nothing, the veteran reporter took hold of a single loose thread — a mother’s decades-old disappearance — and pulled with such tenacity that the history of an entire tumultuous era raveled into view. Here, Keefe applies a similar approach — only this time, instead of Northern Ireland’s Troubles, the context of his latest book is modern London’s obliging relationship with the international financial elite. But as before, there’s an intimately human tragedy at the heart of Keefe’s investigation: a young man’s fatal plunge into the Thames and all the uncomfortable questions British authorities appear reluctant to pursue.

The Edge of Space-Time: Particles, Poetry, and the Cosmic Dream Boogie, by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein (4/7)

“You too can have your mind altered — no drugs necessary.” This, from the book’s introduction, offers something of a promise — which Prescod-Weinstein keeps with gusto, in this jaunty affront to just about everything our senses tell us about the world. The Dartmouth physicist’s follow-up to her lauded debut, The Disordered Cosmos, draws from just about every intellectual nook and cranny — from Bantu linguistics and Star Trek, to hip-hop and gender theory — to weave an idiosyncratic illustration of the universe as physicists understand it today. It’s an accessible take on a flabbergasting subject which, to put it mildly, offers a rather different view of reality than the one I remember learning in school.

My Dear You: Stories, by Rachel Khong (4/7)

This is Khong’s third book of fiction and her first short story collection. In it, she shows off the kind of range suggested by her previous novel, the tripartite Real Americans published two years ago. Here, in the new collection, heavy subjects such as race and grief coexist with conjured spirits and a psychic cat, extraterrestrials and a God who has reconsidered the whole “human” thing — and given everyone a deadline by which they’ll need to decide what other species they’d like to be instead. Understandably, given the givens so far.

Go Gentle, by Maria Semple (4/14)

Now this, my friends, is what we call a romp. Semple is best known for funny, deceptively poignant portraits of mothers in midlife crisis — see: Where’d You Go, Bernadette, a smash best-seller with its own Hollywood adaptation. The star of her newest novel is Adora Hazzard, a divorced philosopher with a sullen teenage daughter, a job teaching morals to rich kids and a growing “coven” of friends living nearby. Hold on tight, though — this one’s plot has twists and turns in abundance, as Hazzard certainly earns her last name in a series of, dare I say, shenanigans, animated always by a subtle, irrepressible joie de vivre.

On the Calculation of Volume, Book IV, by Solveig Balle, translated from the Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith and Jennifer Russell (4/14)

Yep, it’s still November 18. This unassuming date has detained Balle’s narrator for three novels already, and is likely to continue doing so for another three after this one. I hesitate to relate any more details about where the plot of the planned septology stands at this point, for fear of spoiling it for folks who still intend to catch up. Suffice to say, change is afoot at this point for our timelocked narrator, who may not be nearly as alone in her plight as she had initially thought.

Last Night in Brooklyn, by Xochitl Gonzalez (4/21)

Gonzalez stays close to home with her third novel. A dyed-in-the-wool Brooklynite, born and bred, the author of Olga Dies Dreaming has already earned a nod as a Pulitzer finalist for her column concerning gentrification in the borough she calls home. So the departure in her latest book is less in space than time, as her latest novel deposits readers in Brooklyn in 2007, on the cusp of global financial freefall, for a story of class, race, dangerous aspirations and the looming death of a heady era, which bears unmistakable echoes of The Great Gatsby.

American Men, by Jordan Ritter Conn (4/21)

The American men referred to in the grandly sweeping title of Conn’s sophomore book of narrative journalism, in fact, number just four. Each of these men bears the mantle of masculinity differently, grappling differently with all the pressures that the label entails, but each one has also bared his experiences and innermost thoughts to Conn with equally thorough candor. From these four interspersed stories Conn does not produce any sociological claims, still less a polemic, so much as a portrait of four lives so disarmingly frank, it can be difficult to look away — and maybe we shouldn’t.

Small Town Girls: A Memoir, by Jayne Anne Phillips (4/21)

Phillips won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for her last book, Night Watch, a wrenching portrayal of trauma and recovery set in a West Virginia mental asylum following the Civil War. Now, Phillips (“one of our greatest living writers,” according to Michael Chabon, one of that year’s Pulitzer jurors) is returning to the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia, not in historical fiction but in personal retrospect. It’s where Phillips grew up, where she has come to set most of fiction, and her new memoir is not so much about her life alone as it is her lifelong relationship with this place she “can never truly leave.”

The Story of Birds: A New History from Their Dinosaur Origins to Today, by Steve Brusatte (4/28)

Brusatte could not be any clearer about this, folks: Birds. Are. Dinosaurs. The American paleontologist underlines the idea, which is apparently a century and a half old, early and often in The Story of Birds. This expansive history of our fine-feathered neighbors, as scientists understand them today, traces an evolutionary thread that leads directly from landbound behemoths like the triceratops to the airborne raptors that patrol our own skies. As he has done in his previous books — which covered dinosaurs and mammals, respectively — Brusatte offers a lively, loving introduction to his topic that’s as comprehensive as it is accessible.