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Boston Globe
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
‘Deli Boys' is a funny, timely ride for our distracted era
But when the brothers witness their father's gruesome death, they find out the true nature of their father's business: a criminal enterprise where kilos of cocaine are smuggled inside containers of Achar, the pungent South Asian vegetable pickle well known for its overpowering smell, and distributed throughout Philadelphia through DarCo corner store markets. Advertisement Ill-prepared to step into their father's blood-stained chappals, the Dar brothers must lean heavily on their family friend and fellow DarCo board member 'Lucky Auntie' (Poorna Jagannathan) to teach them the inner workings of the 'Dark DarCo' ring. The transition of power inside Dark DarCo leaves the enterprise hobbled and vulnerable at a time when a big deal with a Peruvian gang is already underway. If Dark DarCo doesn't sell off its inventory and repay the Peruvians, their lives will be at stake. Advertisement Saagar Shaikh and Asif Ali in "Deli Boys." Disney/James Washington/Disney What might have been a bloody ' Creator Abdullah Saaeed was previously known for his work on Viceland's 'Bong Appetit' cooking show, where he invited renowned chefs to cook with him using his weed-infused ingredients, and a weekly column turned documentary, 'Weediquette,' which examined the industry and culture around marijuana. He's clearly bringing some personal experience to bear on Raj's stoner new age outlook. But dig a little deeper, and the corporate-minded Mir character might also be a conduit for Saaeed's perspective on the current media environment. Take, for example, the scene when Raj gets stabbed in the stomach and urges his brother Mir to stick his fingers into the wound 'to smell for poop' as a means of determining infection. 'Didn't you watch ' Advertisement These two personalities undoubtedly seem like an odd duo to run a criminal enterprise, but this is what 'Deli Boys' does best: blends all of life, from the truly absurd to the shockingly dark, and even the hopelessly mundane. The characters are all exaggerated, and yet also deeply real at the same time, and the dialogue only plays up this duality. When Lucky Auntie, the right hand woman to the boys' father Baba Dar (Iqbal Theba), holds a board meeting for the more accurately named 'Dark Darco,' she says, 'We're in the red. Blood red,' without a hint of a smile, and yet the humor is palpable. In another scene, older brother Raj attempts to catch a runaway drug runner by leaving out a plate of pretzels as bait. 'Life is not a cartoon!' Mir exasperatedly snaps, only to see the plan actually work seconds later. Perhaps my favorite moment of all was when the brothers attempted to sell a local mob boss on the potency of their reformulated cocaine as a 'rebrand' effort. I began to gasp for laughter when the demonstration turned into a 'Shark Tank' demonstration, complete with dramatic music turns, an infomercial-esque skit, and an embellished final proposal. As Raj implores, 'Drugs are my passion. And I know with this blow, we can make Philly the cocaine capital of the world.' Advertisement With all the silly puns, comical plot twists, and unexpected Tarantino-esque violence, every prediction I had made about how this show would unfold was proven wrong – to my surprise and delight. You never know when a moment will become a poignant commentary on modern reality, or just a gag, and it is exactly this combination of the unknowable and relatable that kept my eyes glued to the TV and off my phone. For a second screen viewer or an undistracted television purist, 'Deli Boys' is a masterclass in wielding attention. The layers involved to make a joke land provided enough for the TV gourmands yet ample opportunities for the distracted viewer to dip in and out, all while transforming ridiculous scenarios into conduits for human truths. And that artistry, one that neither blindly accepts nor rejects audience behavior, may very well be the best path forward for the future of streaming TV shows. DELI BOYS Starring: Asif Ali, Saagar Shaikh, Poorna Jagannathan, Alfie Fuller, Brian George. On Hulu. Jazmin Aguilera can be reached at
Los Angeles Times
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
‘Deli Boys' aims to flip the script on the stories of guys behind the counter
Principal Figgins and Babu Bhatt walk into a bar. Oops, sorry, scratch that — Iqbal Theba and Brian George walk into a restaurant. Theba and George are on Devon Avenue, Chicago's bustling South Asian hub, and they're in town to film 'Deli Boys,' Hulu's new action-packed 'crimedy.' On this show, Theba plays Pakistani patriarch Arshad 'Baba' Dar, who runs DarCo, proprietor of the ABC Deli chain, and George plays Ahmad Uncle, Baba's business partner and a formidable heel. Asif Ali and Saagar Shaikh star as the two leads, Mir and Raj, respectively, Baba's coddled sons, who eventually learn what their father really did for a living. Series creator Abdullah Saeed, along with Ali and Shaikh, brought Theba and George to Devon Avenue, where the cast would often wind up over slow-cooked nihari stew after a long day of shooting. There's something of a passing of the torch happening here. Babu is one of George's best-known roles, though the actor isn't Pakistani like the 'Seinfeld' character. Saeed recalls that Babu must have been the first Pakistani character he saw in an American comedy show. And Theba, who is Pakistani, most notably appeared on 'Glee' as Principal Figgins, as well as 'Friends' (in its 100th episode) and 'Seinfeld.' For Saeed, seeing Theba play a cool, rich dad and hearing George use his natural accent, rather than being shoehorned into diminutive roles or changing their voices, was loaded with meaning. Baba and Ahmad are meaty, three-dimensional characters, not relegated to cab driving or turban wearing. 'Hearing them speak about their experience on this show, on their last days, it was so moving, because you can tell that these guys just love this job,' Shaikh said. 'And they have never gotten to do it the way that they always dreamed of doing.' 'Deli Boys,' premiering Thursday, is here to remedy how South Asians are depicted, but not in a way that feels forced. Saeed says he wasn't trying too hard with the representation angle; he just built the framework for a crazy caper and placed a Pakistani American family within it. When Baba dies suddenly after being hit by a golf ball, the FBI makes it apparent that the family fortune does not, in fact, lie in the ABC Deli chain. Rather, as we find out from Lucky Auntie (a sizzling Poorna Jagannathan), the real money is in the achaar. No, like, in the achaar. Turns out, Baba and Co. have been smuggling bricks of cocaine inside the pungent mango pickle containers. In conversation — over video call from Disney headquarters in Burbank — Saeed, Shaikh and Ali have an effusive chemistry — not unlike the consistency of a jammy achaar. They finish each other's sentences, and crack jokes constantly. 'It was unapologetically just, like, we're not trying to explain anything,' Shaikh said. 'We are just making —' 'Existing,' Asif added. 'We're making our thing,' Shaikh continued. 'It's not on-the-nose or heavy-handed or trying to explain anything. We're just some cool guys being cool guys. That's it.' In other words: 'You cannot orchestrate authenticity.' 'In every element, this show DGAFs,' Saeed continued. 'Because people are used to idealized minorities on TV, they're like, 'Oh, why aren't they perfect?' Because they're f—ing real. At every juncture, if somebody's like, 'Oh, but here's this social rule or assumption that I made that this is breaking,' I'm like, 'We don't give a f— about it.'' That includes assumptions about where, exactly, the plot might go. Saeed, who developed the show with Jenni Konner ('Girls'), has said that his style of comedy is hard turns when you least expect them, a character moment sandwiched by a big plot turn and a joke. 'Deli Boys' showrunner Michelle Nader just likes 'hard comedy.' 'I think that half-hour comedies have gone away from that since streaming,' she wrote in an email. 'This show went for hard funny but not at the expense of a real plot and authentic characters, and that is the trifecta.' There were already plenty of laugh-out-loud jokes in the script — penned by Nader, Saeed, Mehar Sethi, Sudi Green, Feraz Ozel, Kyle Lau, Nikki Kashani and Ekaterina Vladimirova — but once Shaikh and Ali were cast, they added their own zing. Mir, a high-strung anxious perfectionist, was written as more of the audience stand-in, the straight man. But Ali was a comedian before he was an actor, and brought that levity with him. Raj, on the other hand, is a party animal. But, like, a chill one. ('Die a Raj,' Ali quipped, 'or live long enough to see yourself become a Mir.') Originally, Saeed saw himself playing Raj and Shaikh as Mir, but that changed when Ali entered the frame. ('We'll pay you after this,' Ali joked after Saeed sang the actors' praises.) There are two explanations for the two-brother setup: One, Saeed himself is one of 'a pair of brown brothers.' He has a brother who is more than four years older and a half-brother who is 16 years younger, so he understands sibling dynamics well. And two, Raj and Mir are two sides of Saeed himself, manifestations of the push and pull of being a child of immigrants. 'Each brother is the extreme of two ways of thinking about stuff, and externalizing it with these two characters, it just allows us to put them in different situations, and then they exist as those extreme perspectives, and they clash with each other,' he said. 'And the reason they can keep clashing with each other to an insane degree, is because — especially, I feel, with immigrant families and sibling relationships — there's such a strong bond that you know is never going to break, so you're not delicate with it.' And there's a B-side to Baba's backstory, too. Immigrant parents often don't tell us all of their stories — though they rarely involve a covert drug-smuggling ring. 'They keep secrets from us because they think they're protecting us, but actually we would be much better off if we just knew who they really were,' Saeed said. 'And that would make us more whole. But they think they're doing it for us. It's actually hurting us, and it creates this distance.' But there's also love there. Baba omitted the truth to protect his sons — their bewilderment also meant plausible deniability — and Lucky Auntie's tough love shields the boys from any real fallout. 'At its core it is a really sweet family story,' Konner said in an email. 'And it's only because of that emotional story that we are allowed to go so far with the gore, and the jokes, and the way people die.' 'Deli Boys' is all in the family, but, as the show's tagline puts it, the family business is anything but convenient. This pun, and the ABC Delis, are a wry stab at the onscreen stereotype of a South Asian convenience store worker. Over the course of his career, Ali has played the guy at the gas station. 'I was like, oh, man, this sucks, that this is the limitations of our representation in culture,' he said. 'Because I know that I have people in my family that work in these situations, but they're fully fleshed-out people that have families and have stories and have children and have responsibilities and pains and all that, but we never get to see that.' But now, Ali said, they're flipping the script. Now, we get to see the whole life of the guy behind the deli counter, in all its hues — cocaine-dusted, blood-soaked, achaar-stained, sweat-drenched. This hits close to home: Saeed and Shaikh have both worked those counters. (Shaikh says he smoked behind his, in a rebellious teenage/college phase — a true Raj.) And Shaikh's dad and brother have fought to keep the family gas station running. It's the family business. It's something to be proud of. It's a legacy. So is this show: 'This was the job of my life, and I feel like no other job is going to feel as important to me as this one,' Shaikh said. 'And all I want to do is come back to this every time.' 'We made something that pushes us forward in a direction that I think we should be going in, of exploration, of expanding the bounds of what people that look like us can be in,' Ali added. 'We don't have to be in things that are simply thesis statements about us as people. … To me, that's really the real achievement here: to actually make something that feels genuinely new.'
