Deli Boys season 2 — the only disappointment is how quickly it ends
The Disney+ comedy carries all the swagger of a show that’s already won over its audience, and creator Abdullah Saeed remains committed to making audiences laugh by any means necessary
Most second seasons arrive carrying the weight of expectation, and television history is littered with shows that are a shadow of their former selves. The 00s sci-fi series Heroes, for example, collapsed under its own mythology. ITV’s Broadchurch couldn’t justify a return trip, and Big Little Lies somehow squandered Meryl Streep. Disney+’s Deli Boys, thankfully, sticks the second landing.
The Pakistani-American crime comedy carries stacks of drug money, an “emotional support gun” and all the swagger of a show that knows it has already won audiences over.
If the first season asked viewers to buy into a deeply ridiculous premise — what if Succession’s incompetent daddy-issue-laden heirs inherited a secret cocaine empire and happened to be Pakistani Americans? — the second just gets to mess around and find out. The Dars now have more money, more enemies and, somehow, even less of an idea of what they are doing.
One of the greatest pleasures of Deli Boys is the sense that everybody involved is having the time of their life. While television executives increasingly seem convinced that every show should either become a sprawling cinematic universe or a sombre meditation on trauma, creator Abdullah Saeed remains committed to making audiences laugh by any means necessary. There are plenty of crime dramas on television. There are fewer crime comedies. And there are no other crime comedies willing to be this unhinged.
Season two finds brothers Mir (Asif Ali) and Raj Dar (Saagar Shaikh) continuing their attempts to run the criminal empire secretly built by their late Baba. Hovering over all of this chaos is Poorna Jagannathan’s magnificent Lucky.
The current TV landscape has no shortage of formidable anti-heroines, but few are as entertaining as a woman capable of running a crime syndicate, punching her way out of a building and still finding time to judge everybody else’s fashion choices. Lucky remains the fiercest (in both senses of the word) person in every room she enters. Jagannathan plays her with such conviction that even the show’s most outrageous acts of badassery feel entirely plausible.
Under Lucky’s guidance, the brothers have evolved from bewildered nepo babies into slightly less bewildered nepo babies. While the first season saw them struggling to fill their drug kingpin patriarch’s shoes, season two finds them setting their sights considerably higher. Why settle for running the unscrupulous family business when you could become “the Rockefellers but brown” or, ideally, “the Hadids but dudes”? Unfortunately, self-belief remains one of the few skills they have actually mastered.
The slimlined season — with just six episodes — still finds time for several inspired detours. Raj briefly becomes an unlikely internet sensation after a spell behind bars transforms him into a hunky folk hero, while Andrew Rannells clearly relishes chewing every bit of scenery as district attorney and mayoral hopeful Andrew Chadwater. Elsewhere, Lucky’s budding romance with casino owner and money-laundering expert Max Sugar (the always delightful Fred Armisen) proves that putting two wildly manipulative people into a relationship is still one of nature’s most reliable sources of comedy.
What remains most refreshing about Deli Boys is how little interest it has in explaining itself. The Urdu is still there, as are the family politics and aunties capable of inflicting life-altering damage with a single withering assessment. The cultural specificity that made the first season so powerful stays intact and nobody seems interested in turning these interactions into teaching moments. The show just assumes viewers can keep up with its 10-joke-a-minute rhythm.
That confidence pays off because the actors are allowed to dial the comedy up to 11. And the characters are not role models or punchlines. They are just people who want to find love, fulfil their potential and clean stupendous quantities of drug money through a convenience store empire.
The only real disappointment is how quickly it ends. Just as the Dars hit their stride, the credits roll on a cliffhanger, leaving viewers with the rare complaint that a TV show should have lasted longer. The hardest thing to accept isn’t that Mir and Raj are running a cocaine empire. It’s that we have to now wait for season three.
Deli Boys is streaming on Disney+.
