Jude Law is fine in Black Rabbit but Jason Bateman is the real star

If you’re looking for a more sophisticated alternative to the current glut of unhinged dramas – The Girlfriend, The Guest, Coldwater, all of which feature bonkers behaviour – then try Black Rabbit (Netflix). It stars Jude Law and Jason Bateman as a restaurateur and his disaster-area of a brother, and what at first could be mistaken for a knock-off of The Bear slowly becomes a salty crime saga in which the pair get into increasingly dire straits.

Jake Friedken (Law) runs hip New York restaurant and private members’ bar Black Rabbit, where all the beautiful people flock to eat $50 hamburgers and snort cocaine. It was Vince (Bateman), Jake’s brother, who had the vision for the place and helped to make it a roaring success. But Vince is an addict – drink, drugs, gambling, you name it – and has been out of the picture for some time.

The show opens with a violent robbery interrupting a party at the restaurant, just as Jake is describing it as “a place where the night could go anywhere”. Then we revert to a month earlier, and a detailed explanation of how we got here.

Vince is grifting in Reno when we first meet him, and circumstances bring him back to New York. He’s a magnet for trouble and his reappearance is the catalyst for Jake’s gilded life to start falling apart. As the episodes go by, we see that Jake has been hiding problems of his own.

The role is not a stretch for Law. He can turn out this kind of character in his sleep: charming demeanour, suavely dressed, a little bit shifty. He exudes the air of a man who could sleep with his best friend’s girlfriend without feeling too bad about it. Bateman does the better work – some of the best work of his career – making Vince shambolically likeable. Bad things happen to Vince, for which he mostly has himself to blame, and he reacts with a mixture of outrage, exasperation and humour.

Episode one is a slow build. A woman called Anna slinks out of the building. A man called Wes says he just wants Estelle to be happy. You don’t initially know who these people are or what any of this means, but stick with it and eventually it becomes clear. The action builds, brick by brick, as some unpleasant types call in Vince’s debts. Jake gets drawn in, because he runs the city’s hottest restaurant and surely there’s a lot of cash swilling around?

The New York depicted here is grimy, but basing the show around an achingly cool restaurant, with cameras taking us behind the pass to see chefs preparing dishes or stressing about the imminent arrival of the New York Times food critic, gives the series a glossier sheen than dramas such as Ozark and Breaking Bad, to which the writers of Black Rabbit clearly aspire. It isn’t in the same league, but it’s worth your time.

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