The Fresh Funny Voices Behind Showtime’s Hot New Show: Flatbush Misdemeanors
Dan Perlman and Kevin Iso bring their award winning web series Flatbush Misdemeanors to the big little screen on Showtime beginning this Sunday, and introduce comedy fans to their own very unique, very fresh point of view.
Flatbush Misdemeanors- already getting rave reviews- isn’t the fantasy New York of shows like Sex and the City, or even Girls. This is the New York that real people live in.
The series follows “Dan” and “Kevin” and their attempt to navigate life in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Unlike most series central figures, neither Dan nor Kevin are exceptional figures. They’re not villains or heroes. They are two laid-back, if somewhat hapless young men, figuring out how to fit into the world around them. Perlman and Iso both are able to find what is uniquely funny about situations that aren’t obvious or cliché. They find the humor in awkward situations; the square peg in the round hole. Everyone with social anxiety will be able to relate even though your peg or your hole may look different from theirs. What Judd Apatow did with the high school anxiety of Freaks and Geeks, Perlman and Iso do for the anxieties of living in an urban multicultural city in 2021.
I spoke to Dan Perlman and Kevin Iso about their path from open mic comics to series creators.
Kevin and Dan met in the comedy clubs of New York City while they were doing open mics. Both were young, starting out, and armed with ideas and ambition. What drew them to collaborate was a shared desire to actually create. “When I moved up here from Houston, I was always into making videos. I was just watching the guys in front of me. The ones that I felt were very successful were doing other things too. Dan shared a similar ambition. It just made sense,” Kevin told me. Dan voiced that same need. “Kevin was the first person I met who had a similar drive to just film stuff and make stuff,” Dan said, “not just plan forever. Sometimes people just talk and don’t actually do anything.”
Flatbush Misdemeanors, in its earliest form, was sketch, that evolved into a web series format, created on no budget, and with help from comedy friends. Dan and Kevin would write, and film digital sketches for a YouTube channel called Moderately Funny. Even though they were writing unrelated sketches, Kevin said they would notice certain repeating elements that would come up. The characters might change on the surface, but there was definitely something cohesive forming. Flatbush Misdemeanors evolved naturally out of that pool of content. “We were being the same person. It was just down these narrative paths and we were using the same people and they were killing their roles,” Kevin told me. They realized they could turn these elements into a long form narrative. “We were, in a way, piecing together a story in three minutes already, and we just turned it into a whole thing.”
At first, Dan said, people didn’t understand Flatbush. So they cut it up, and shot the first short- 15 pages abbreviated from the pilot they wrote. Once people saw it, they got it right away, he said. The web series didn’t have a viral liftoff, but enough people were noticing and embracing it to give it traction. The short series won awards and even qualified for Oscar contention, and they started pitching the show to networks. While they were shopping the series around, Covid hit, making everything uncertain. And then in October 2020, Showtime picked up the series for a May debut, requiring Kevin and Dan to hit the ground running. “I mean, we had to dive right in,” Dan said. “We had two written and then had to write the others, and fix the first two and then shoot them all. And then to premiere, end of May. So, just breeze right into it. There was no like, “I will take a couple of weeks and then we’ll think about it.” Yeah, we just had to go.”
It was a tough timeline particularly for their first series, but they learned on the job. “It probably helps that I have no frame of reference for how long it should take. But I didn’t really question it. [People would say] “You know this is insane, right?” And I was like, “I don’t know.” Dan said. On the other hand, they finally had a budget to work with, and people who could build sets, or arrange for permits. “It’s so funny, because it’s a low budget show comparatively for TV, but to us, it’s like, this is crazy. We have a sound team, with hair and makeup. They just gave me a haircut!” Dan said. “It was fun seeing every comedian, we get so used to just being treated terribly on the road gigs. They come in and there’s craft services and they’re like, “Is it cash or card?” It was so unthinkable that they would just give them breakfast!”
Flatbush Misdemeanors premieres Sunday, May 23 on Showtime at 10:30pm. And you can watch the premiere episode, for free, on YouTube, showtime.com or sho.com.
