‘Black Rabbit’ Episode 1 Recap: “The Cyclone”

Jake Friedken (Jude Law) is checking his look in the mirror, preparing to be on. Every inch of Black Rabbit’s vintage Lower East Side building is packed, especially the VIP, and the instant the restaurant-bar’s proprietor hits the floor, Jake’s working the chatty, boisterous room. He’s got Chef Roxie (Amaka Okafor) creating fifty-dollar burgers in the kitchen, stabbing the buns with bones. Mel (Gus Birney) is on the door, turning away pretenders to the guest list. The negronis are flowing, his friend Wes (Sop Dirisu) gives him the high sign, and Jake’s got a jeweler on hand to reward his staff with some gleaming new wrist ice. “This is the kind of party Black Rabbit was built for!” he tells the VIP crowd with a toast. Little does Jake Friedken know there’s a hurricane about to blow into town, and its name is Vince (Jason Bateman).   

Law and Bateman are brothers in Black Rabbit, a series created by Zach Baylin (King Richard) and Kate Susman, who both recently worked with Law in The Order. Bateman also directs a few episodes, as will Laura Linney. The feel here is contemporary, with lots of natural light and using the cramped, reclaimed spaces of the nightspot almost like another character. Black Rabbit’s certainly the main character in Jake’s life; the ex-musician and child of the bar industry has put his heart, soul, and investors’ money into the place, and with a talented chef like Roxie, he sees it as a gateway to more exposure, more restaurant openings – TV, cookbooks, you name it. Naveen (Amir Malaklou), his money man, jokes with him. “OK, Danny Meyer.”

Jake’s making it work. Precariously – this is New York City, and every food and liquor vendor and credit line leech is knocking on the door, waiting to be paid. But he’s making it work. With Val (Dagmara Domińczyk), he seems to be a solid co-parent to young Hunter (Michael Cash). (“Huntie” handles texting back Jake’s contacts while he drives the boy to his exclusive school in a gorgeous early-eighties Jag XJ6.) He’s even handling the closing of his late mother’s rambling house out in Queens. It’s not like he could rely on Vince to do it, who used the house as collateral on a loan he skated on. And besides, Vince is busy, ramming a pair of vintage coin thieves with his shitbox Plymouth Reliant K outside a low-rent casino in Reno.

Vince, we learn, has a series of hustles in the shape of a life. He’s been into drugs. He’s behind with the bookies. His stringy brown beard matches the pit stains in his Sonic Youth Dirty T. And when the hustle with the coins goes south, he’s at the end of his rope. Again. In New York, the phone rings with an unknown 775 number. “I don’t have a fuck-ton of options – I just gotta jump,” and with a concerned sigh – almost like an investment in the trouble this will cause him – Jake, who Vince knows will never deny him, buys him a plane ticket to NYC. 

The first episode of Black Rabbit is structured with a flash-forward before we get to the meat inside the bun. By the time Vince reunites with Jake in New York, we’ve already caught a panicky, violent sequence where masked thieves try to rob the Rabbit’s safe and instead shake down the entire VIP at gunpoint. (“All the jewelry up in this bitch goes in the bag!”) Its non-linear story, the crisp yet casual dialogue, two brothers at its center, the lighting, the bar spaces, the disputes over money, all of it – early on, Black Rabbit is giving us Michael Clayton vibes, and we’re anticipating trouble as it fills in the space between the robbery and one month before, when Vince arrives.

“Did it ever occur to you that it wasn’t my fault, that I didn’t do anything?” It’s more than clear that Jake and Vince love each other, but maintain a rapport dinged by “Vin”’s various troubles over the years. (Jake’s answer to his brother: “No.”) It’s been two years since Vince was in New York, when he had a hand in helping build Black Rabbit from the ground up. He’s one of these guys who can step with care into something like bartending immediately – but can also ricochet into trouble at the drop of a hat. (Bateman plays this with ease, a charming touch cut with the lies in his eyes.) It’s a kind of loving burden for Jake, managing his brother. As he tells Hunter while at a Brooklyn Nets game with Wes and Estelle (Cleopatra Coleman), Uncle Vince “just sucks up so much oxygen.”

No matter what Vince’s dive bar-owning buddy Matt (Don Harvey) says, the people Vince owes money to have not forgotten his debts. Within hours of his arrival in the city, he’s threatened by two goons who give him 14 days to pay back six figures. Where’s a guy who’s “52, and got zero” gonna get scratch like that? We’re not prepared to say it’s Vince behind one of those ski masks, attempting to rob his brother’s popular establishment. But he lies to Jake’s face at least twice in the opening episode, so there are possibilities there. 

At the same time, we are prepared to say Jude Law and Jason Bateman are gonna be a dream to watch be brothers. We get so much of their dynamic ironed out in the first hour of the series, it feels like twice that time. By the end of it, Wes is saying “I’m so happy to see the band back together,” because while Vince crashed into Black Rabbit on the big night of a New York Times food critic’s visit, he didn’t derail her meal of crab with ranch rémoulade, and instead stepped in to help out a short-staffed Jake. (“Four negronis? Coming right up.”) At the end of the night, Jake asks him to stay on. “What do you look like with your hair up?” His regular VIP bartender Anna (Abbey Lee) is going through something – she ghosted her shifts. Can Vince hang and help at Black Rabbit for a couple weeks? Sure, no problem. He’s gotta stay in town anyway, to try and keep avoiding the money thugs who are after him. A month before the robbery of the Rabbit, the Friedken brothers are in the eye of the storm. Hurricane Vince has settled over New York City.

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.