I'm the absolute target audience for Max's new series, Bookie. Why? I'm a dude, I'm a gambler, I cover the sports betting industry, I'm 25-54, I'm solidly middle class with disposable income, and, perhaps more than anything else, I’m a sucker for the Max machine.
Put a show on Max – you know, what used to be HBO – and I'm a -600 favorite to love it. The Sopranos, The Wire, Veep … the list goes on and on and on. Heck, I watched every episode of John From Cincinnati. I will try anything this crew offers, and I will generally stick with it.
But after watching the first two episodes of Bookie … well, I suppose there's a reason this is a Thursday streamer for the network instead of a Sunday night tentpole.'
The show stars Sebastian Maniscalco as Danny, a bookie in Los Angeles. Now, to be fair, I don't know a whole lot about the actual underworld of street bookmaking, but I'm pretty sure it doesn't usually involve Charlie Sheen, a potential murder, a suicide, a second kinda-sorta but not really murder, transgender deadbeats, magic mushrooms, $150,000 watches, hookers with attitude, a running “joke” about cash that smells like human feces, and the quickest car repossession in the history of mankind – and all within a roughly 24-hour time frame.