A crime comedy with a heavy skew toward the comedy, Deli Boys sets its unserious tone with the slapstick demise of patriarch Baba Dar (Iqbal Theba), who gushes blood after taking a golf ball to the head as his slack-jawed failsons Mir (Asif Ali) and Raj (Saagar Shaikh) look on in horror.
Mir and Raj are a classic odd couple, the former an uptight MBA type engaged to a nice pharma rep and the latter a charismatic party boy who boasts an “orgy cabal” in lieu of a single partner. But when an FBI raid robs the brothers of their worldly possessions and reveals the existence of “Dark DarCo,” the internal name for the Dar empire’s true source of income, Mir and Raj partner up to outsmart the feds and ascend the criminal hierarchy.
Deli Boys is mostly a farce that transposes “Godfather”-style tropes about immigrant communities who turn to extralegal means to gain a foothold in the States onto Pakistani Americans, who’ve historically lacked a corollary to the Italian Mafia or Jewish Murder, Inc.
Dark DarCo smuggles bricks of powder inside jugs of achar, the pungent South Asian pickle, and a popular fixer for disappearing dead bodies (Baba is far from the only casualty in the 10-episode season) is known as the “Murder Walla.” In lieu of capos, this organization has maliks, who start jockeying control once Baba’s death creates a power vacuum.
