Plenty of comedies have used New York and its distinctive boroughs as backdrops—and main characters—for their stories of people just trying to get by in the big city. As of late, many of those films and TV series have been born out of Brooklyn, its 21st Century renaissance fostering a comedy scene all its own, but a show like Flatbush Misdemeanors proves that the city’s largest borough still has so much more story to tell. “[Flatbush] is very different from a lot of the other neighborhoods—even in Brooklyn alone,” says series co-creator Kevin Iso. Back in 2017, Iso and his collaborator Dan Perlman started their darkly comic web series of the same name as way to show their side of the city, through their eyes. “It’s just cool to show a New York that’s different than the sort of already gentrified—like Williamsburgh or Park Avenue—New York,” says Perlman, “and just tell it in an authentic way, not sensationalized or anything. [You’re] just living with these characters.”
Five years later, Iso and Perlman are bringing that point-of-view to Showtime, following fictionalized versions of themselves living day-to-day in one of the city’s liveliest and most diverse neighborhoods. In the video above, the duo discusses Flatbush Misdemeanors’ journey from a self-made, no-budget web series to a major premium television network, and the ways that bigger platform has and hasn’t altered the DNA of the show. Iso and Perlman also share why they avoided bringing the pandemic into the show and what they learned about one another in the process
Flatbush Misdemeanors premieres May 23 on Showtime.