Deli Boys Season 1 Review: A Rollicking but Heartfelt Family Crime Comedy

Deli Boys Season 1 is a smart, funny, and enjoyable binge, featuring a superb cast that tread close to and subvert the classic crime drama tropes.

The show’s stars, Saagar Shaikh and Asif Ali, playing Raj and Mir Dar, play their fish out of water roles very well, making for a hilarious ride for the audience.

The surprise of Raj and Mir finding out that Baba Dar was actually the head of a criminal drug trafficking enterprise barely registers before the brothers are thrown into the deep end.

In its 10 half-hour episodes, the show keeps a brisk pace, sometimes sacrificing more emotional depth and character development in the first half of the season. However, the second half allows Raj, Mir and the wonderfully portrayed Lucky Aunty (Poorna Jagannathan) more time to dwell on their loss of and share some necessary heart-to-hearts. 

Jagannathan is absolutely the scene-stealer, clearly enjoying her expletive-filled dialogue and cold-blooded killer personality. Personally, I would thoroughly enjoy a spin-off focused solely on Lucky Aunty exploring her rise in the criminal underbelly of Philadelphia.

Aside from Jagannathan, all of the supporting cast play their roles with gusto, especially Brian George. George portrays Ahmed Uncle, one of Baba’s closest friends, with all the appropriate sass, and his rivalry with Lucky Aunty is extremely entertaining. Some of the characters do occasionally border on caricature, as with the Italian mob boss Chickie Lozano

Considering how much the show is embedded within the Dars’ family and friends, the jokes take on a more culturally specific angle, which works quite well.

It’s why the audience might just be convinced that the Dar family was selling cocaine in achar jars because it is pungent enough to cover it up or that a massive Desi wedding could be used as a cover for smuggling drugs.

Almost the entire main cast and guest stars are comprised of South Asians, and it’s clear the comfort each of the actors have with the setting and storyline, often easily switching between English and Urdu casually. Even if the story becomes increasingly ridiculous each episode, the judgmental Desi mother-in-law feels very close to reality.

At the breakneck speed that the show goes, the grief that Raj and Mir must feel for their father is not quite as present as you would expect, but their relationship with each other is well-developed.

There are some moments where a possibly more incisive commentary on immigrants having to claw their way up the ladder by any means necessary shines through.

The show satirizes the “I came here with nothing, but made myself a business tycoon” quite well, but there was more potential to elaborate on the absurdity of how hard immigrants have to work for often very little when they come to the U.S.

Some of the twists are easy to see coming, but the show knows this and plays with those expectations accordingly. There are also some inventive filmmaking choices made, especially in the contrast of the brothers’ morning routine: Raj is painstakingly cooking up drugs, while Mir brews his coffee in careful steps. 

Even as the scramble to keep their criminal enterprise afloat reaches its peak, the show finds a way to keep you rooting for Raj and Mir.

They killed a man (badly) on Deli Boys Season 1 Episode 1, “Pilot,” but you can’t help but root for them to find a way out of this mess, considering how far they are willing to go to protect each other and to protect their family and friends. 

With a satisfying ending, Deli Boys is an extremely enjoyable binge that will keep you rooting for its main cast, even with their questionable morals, making for an impressively culturally specific family crime comedy.

What did you think of this season of Deli Boys? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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Deli Boys is available to stream on Hulu.

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