Illegal gambling comedy Bookie is a change of pace for sitcom king

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Chuck Lorre and Nick Bakay, co-creators of pithy new HBO comedy Bookie, are sitting on a large and comfy look couch in the former’s office. It’s a piece of furniture that looks like it belongs in the workplace of one of Hollywood’s most successful showrunners. Not because it’s a luxury piece that reeks of status, but rather due to the couch looking perfect as a substitute bed for a working writer pulling an all-nighter.

Sebastian Maniscalco and Omar J. Dorsey in Bookie.Credit: Binge/HBO Max

“You have a very dark vision of the job, but you’re not wrong,” says Lorre, a one-time songwriter who got his foot in the door as a writer on Roseanne in the late 1980s and went on to assemble a slew of popular and lucrative sitcoms across four decades, including Cybill, Dharma & Greg, Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory and Mom.

Bookie is something of a change of pace for Lorre and Bakay, who met on Two and a Half Men and subsequently wrote together on Mom and Young Sheldon. Shot on location across Los Angeles, it’s the story of an illegal bookmaker, Danny (Sebastian Maniscalco), who is forever taking bets and weighing up all kinds of the odds – whether from his motley clients, corner-cutting associates or demanding partner and family.

Constantly on the move to drop off winnings or more often than not make collections, Danny is more harried deliveryman than a heavy. He’s unfamiliar with the gun in his car, and his sidekick, former American football player Ray (Omar Dorsey), is around to serve as a “visual deterrent” rather than actually beating up tardy debtors. Danny is a small business owner in a cash economy, forever counting wins and losses.

“We made it clear that there’s no real violence,” Lorre says. “We didn’t want to play that cop show stuff, the cliche of violence where you threaten to break someone’s knees. We talked to a lot of bookies all over the country and violence is bad business. It’s expensive and brings the police.”

As comic tools, Danny and Ray are versatile magnets. They’re constantly bantering with different people or walking into unexpected situations, and Danny’s endeavours are always shadowed by an existential threat. California is one of the few American states that hasn’t legalised sports gambling – “you’re next,” a former marijuana dealer, Hector (Lost’s Jorge Garcia), who lost his livelihood to legalisation, tells Danny.

Omar J. Dorsey and Maxim Swinton in Bookie.Credit: Binge/HBO Max

“These guys are dinosaurs looking up and seeing the asteroid heading for Earth and going ‘this doesn’t look good for us’,” Lorre says. “This is a show about guys whose business is inevitably going to be taken away by big tech.”

“We think that is very relatable,” adds Bakay, a long-time sports gambler who was lamenting his bad bets with bookies in print and on sports network segments years before online gambling companies started relentlessly advertising their services. It was Bakay’s anecdotes that both inspired Lorre and supplied the specifics for Bookie’s eight half-hour episodes.

“Nick has a background, not only as a degenerate gambler, but as a very knowledgeable resource on this,” Lorre says. “One of the things I learned from Nick is that Danny is an old-school character: get to know your customers. When they win, you go to them and hand them the cash in the envelope, and you extend them credit because you’ve vetted them and know they can conceivably pay. So much of this is about relationships over a period of time – it’s not a guy staring at a computer screen.”

Chuck Lorre’s The Big Bang Theory: the sitcom is not dead.Credit: Warner Bros

“We’ve done a lot of years together and we have a good rhythm,” says Bakay of their writing collaboration. “I know that we trust each other’s instincts. That helps a lot. But this one was different from what we normally do. We got to stretch our legs and do new things.”

Both Lorre and Bakay, who enthusiastically cite the blackly comic Australian crime series Mr Inbetween as an inspiration for Bookie, believe that classical sitcom acting, where you perform live for a studio audience, is a specialised type of acting, often more akin to theatre to television. For Bookie’s leading man, they needed someone with a different set of comedic skills, with Lorre reaching out to Maniscalco, a hugely popular American stand-up comedian primed to transition from supporting roles in movies such as Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman to headlining a series.

Bookie isn’t Lorre’s first comedy to break loose of the sitcom’s formal tenets. He previously had a success on Netflix with three seasons of The Kominsky Method, in which Michael Douglas played an ageing acting coach, but he doesn’t believe that the traditional sitcom has lost its attraction.

“I have read the obituaries for situation comedies for 30 years, but it’s just a matter of someone making a good show,” Lorre says. “At the end of the day, I don’t think the audience cares about how many cameras you use, just make characters we care about and make it funny and the audiences will come.”

With Bookie, Lorre was able to come full circle in his sitcom history in one distinct regard. Danny and Ray’s rounds include several visits to Charlie Sheen, with the Hollywood star playing a version of himself full of questionable advice and gambling debts. Lorre and Sheen were friends and collaborators for years on Two and a Half Men before Sheen was fired from the show in 2011 due to illegal drug usage. His self-destructive behaviour at the time included vitriolic comments about Lorre, but when Lorre reached out during pre-production, Sheen was receptive to not only working together, but sending himself up.

“It was a joyful reunion after all the years of heartache and that mad clusterf— that ended our relationship,” Lorre says. “We were able to say it was in the past and he had a great sense of humour about himself and he was able to play Charlie Sheen the degenerate gambler and make fun of himself. Charlie has a great deal of perspective on his public persona.”

Bookie streams on Binge from Thursday, November 30.

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