Critic Reviews
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Anchored by a riotously badass performance and fantastic jokes, Deli Boys emerges as a highlight of this young year, layering an engaging criminal caper on top of a comedy about the Pakistani immigrant experience.
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Ultimately, it is a chaotic, irreverently funny, and refreshingly unpredictable series that will hook you in like a strong, bold cup of chai and leave you wanting more.
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Concealed within these broad characters is a capacity for emotional nuance that you don’t often see in either a sub-Sopranos gangster show or a half-hour action comedy. By making us care what happens to Mir and Dar and their aunties and uncles, Deli Boys balances bloody knuckles with a tender heart.
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With all the silly puns, comical plot twists, and unexpected Tarantino-esque violence, every prediction I had made about how this show would unfold was proven wrong — to my surprise and delight.
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The Pakistani tilt to “Deli Boys” is refreshing. So is Mr. Saeed’s instinct for sensing the edge of acceptable comedy and then stomping all over it. Raj and Mir are more or less conventional goofballs, but the elders in their orbit are dryly hilarious.
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It’s smartly written, festooned with quirky business, farcical situations, droll asides. Above all, it’s built on great performances, even in the smallest roles, that ground the wackiness and so make things only funnier.
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Even if Deli Boys doesn’t deliver on thrills, it’s a humorous delight when it focuses on Raj, Mir, and Lucky as a trio.
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Because of the funny moments, and the idea that these two coddled young men are now going to have to get into hardcore criminal activity, we are feeling pretty good about the prospects that the first season of Deli Boys will be entertaining.
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“Deli Boys” is not too dark, too violent, or too explicit to immediately watch all the way through. It’s bizarre and hilarious and fun enough to keep a viewer hooked, and hopefully to merit a second season
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The cast is universally terrific, the writing is often crisp and witty — but the blood-spattered shtick grows a bit tiresome and repetitive, and we can never quite shake that feeling that even in a dark comedy, drug dealing just isn’t funny.
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It’s a bit of a letdown to realize that what could have been a sharp and unique take on the gangster subgenre has no apparent interest in taking on that challenge. It seems content, instead, to kick back on the couch and quote The Godfather all day.
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