Deli Boys Is a Madcap Gangster Comedy With Loads of Heart

Ah, the American Dream. Step 1: Arrive in Philadelphia with $3 in your pocket. Step 2: Get a job at a deli. Step 3: Buy said deli. Step 4: Invent a ludicrously large to-go cup. Step 5: Use the proceeds to open 40 delis. Step 6: Diversify into the golf course and mango pickle industries. Step 7: Drop dead after taking a golf ball to the head, in front of your two adult sons, who have no idea that you’re a crime boss using your fleet of delis as a front for cocaine distribution.

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That, at least, is how Baba Dar (Iqbal Theba) amassed his considerable fortune. The Pakistani-born patriarch (Baba is Urdu for father) gets his skull shattered within the first few minutes of the rollicking crime comedy Deli Boys, whose first season is now streaming on Hulu. Which leaves his sons, Raj (Saagar Shaikh) and Mir (Asif Ali), to claim their places atop a hierarchy of gangsters they’d been led to believe was a legitimate business. The brothers are both unsuited to succeed Baba for different reasons. Raj, the elder of the two, spends his days partying with his woo-woo “twin flame,” Prairie (Alfie Fuller), and squandering Baba’s money on drugs. A cleancut junior-executive type, Mir has an MBA; a high-maintenance fiancée, Bushra (Zainne Saleh), and ambitions of rising within Baba’s public-facing company, DarCo.

It’s only when the FBI raids the DarCo conference room while Mir is pitching himself as CEO that the brothers start to realize their dad wasn’t on the up and up. With the company shut down for various white-collar crimes and the family’s possessions seized, leaving the Dars broke, they resign themselves to rebuilding Baba’s empire via his sole asset that wasn’t tied to DarCo: the first deli he bought as a new immigrant. This is where the full extent of Baba’s criminal activities finally comes to light. Turns out, there was coke in the tubs of mango pickle all along. And the business partners Raj and Mir have always known as Lucky Auntie (Poorna Jagannathan) and Ahmad Uncle (Brian George) were actually Baba’s consiglieres. Now that bickering duo is vying to take his place, with a mismatched pair of feds—an intense rookie (Alexandra Ruddy) and her legend-in-his-own-mind boss, played by Tim Baltz—tracking their every move.

Deli Boys is not the kind of show you watch for the ingenuity of the plot. If you’re familiar with the crime genre, you’ll likely see twists coming several episodes away. It can be silly; a cold open where a bloody guy wearing only socks, underwear, and a paper bag over his head bolts out of the deli, trailed by the panicked, apron-clad brothers, sets the tone for the series. But the broadness and the familiarity are part of its charm. First-time creator Abdullah Saeed, working with executive producers Jenni Konner (Girls) and showrunner Michelle Nader (2 Broke Girls), clearly adores the gangster canon of Coppola, Scorsese, and Tarantino, as well as gritty antihero TV like Breaking Bad. So do the Dars. They have a shouting match over whether Better Call Saul is worth paying for an entire streaming subscription. Mir struts down the city street doing quid pro quo favors for neighbors like Don Corleone on the day his daughter is to be married. The show delights in goofy underworld characters. There’s a “cocaine chef” whose signature is mixing in a touch of cardamom when he cuts the product. One Italian Mafioso is named Chickie Lozano (Kevin Corrigan), but everyone mispronounces his last name as “Lasagna.”

The Dar brothers’ fandom—the fact that they aren’t natural thugs, their knowledge of the demimonde is limited to movies and TV, and they’re shocked when they don’t take to it with the amoral ease of a Walter White—makes them relatable. Some of the dialogue between them is hilarious. (“What’s a mook?” “They conquered Spain in the eighth century.”) And Deli Boys distinguishes itself from the glut of gangster stories by situating itself within specific cultures, both Pakistani American and Philadelphian. There’s a vast generation gap between immigrants and their Americanized offspring; Indian and Pakistani elders harbor prejudices dating back to partition. One crucial clue comes in the form of an egregiously expired Tastykake, a favorite Philly snack that would never sit for years, unpurchased, on a deli shelf in the city.

More than anything else, what distinguishes the show is the genuine warmth of the relationships within this murderous crime family. Charismatic slacker Raj and uptight striver Mir aren’t just foils for each other; their mutual love is unmistakable, which gives weight to the looming prospect that the stress of salvaging Baba’s empire could tear them apart. The cast’s MVP is Jagannathan, an alum of Never Have I Ever and Big Little Lies. Tough, shrewd, and bursting with Machiavellian ambition, Lucky is also fiercely loyal to Baba and his bumbling offspring. “Everything I do for you is in your best interest,” she tells the Dars. And that checks out, though some of her ruthless choices still hit them where it hurts. Concealed within these broad characters is a capacity for emotional nuance that you don’t often see in either a sub-Sopranos gangster show or a half-hour action comedy. By making us care what happens to Mir and Dar and their aunties and uncles, Deli Boys balances bloody knuckles with a tender heart. 

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