Black Rabbit Recap ‘The Black Rabbits’: We don’t choose our families

Black Rabbit Season 1 Episode 2

It was a beat, a small change in tone, but it encapsulated Black Rabbit’s second episode, and perhaps even the entirety of the series. Jake, now aware of the deep hole his brother Vince was in, feeling compelled to protect his niece Gen after Junior and his henchman threatened her, went to see the boss himself, Joe Mancuso. Their meeting was initially warm. Mancuso told Jake he now looked even more like his mother. There was almost familial fondness there, or at least, a show of calm and reason, in stark contrast to Junior’s wannabe gangster stance. Mancuso even asked one of his men to get Jake a coffee.

Jake’s proposal was straightforward — he would pay Mancuso twenty grand a week until he has paid up Vince’s debt which, now that he had taken this meeting, was now his own. Junior was vehemently against what he called a payment plan, but Mancuso overruled him. Mancuso accepted the deal, but he dictated the terms. First payment was on Monday, four days away. If Jake was late even one day, the Black Rabbit was his. When Jake tried to assert that his restaurant was not on the table, Mancuso’s quick fingers dropped the hot coffee on his lap. He had known Jake and Vince since they were children, he knew their parents, there was history there, but this was business. 

Junior was interpreting his father’s sign language the whole time, and he had to say the words that must have nicked his heart. Mancuso told Jake his brother had a problem, and Junior did not listen (Mancuso had previously forbidden Junior from lending Vince money). Unfortunately for them, they don’t get to choose their families. Junior’s pause there was short but notable, as was the lightest tonal variation in his words. His father knew how to cut him deep, and did it deliberately. 

When Vince finally came to Jake with his problem, it was as a final resort, after he had exhausted everything, including selling the expensive shoes Wes gave him. Vince had pinned his hopes on his share of the sale of their mother’s house, a sale that was not going to push through because the inspector found electrical issues that prevented the house from getting a Certificate of Occupancy. The buyers were going to walk away unless Jake agreed to a much lower price, a price that would only leave Jake and Vince breaking even. Prior to their agent Isaac breaking that particular bit of terrible news, Jake and Vince had been getting along. Jake was encouraging with Vince’s attempt at starting over. Vince was receptive to the idea of sticking around in New York, and told Jake he had gone to see his daughter Gen. Once the rug was pulled out from under them, their tempers flared. Vince did not understand why Jake was so upset, when he was under the impression that Jake had money and was not in dire need of it. Jake did not understand why Vince would say that with the sale gone kaput, he was dead; Jake had been under the impression that Vince had squared away his New York debts.  

Vince went to Matt, with whom he had been staying, and asked for some cash  (he didn’t have any) and the location of an illegal game (Sigman’s). Then he headed over to Wes, but though Wes was happy to hand over the $2500 he had in his wallet, he lost his temper when Vince named the exorbitant amount of thirty thousand dollars. Vince backed down immediately and left with the $2500 and a borrowed tie.

At first, Vince was winning, and he played the part of a player having a grand time. He came close to getting the money he needed to pay back Junior, but of course he just ended up losing everything. Penniless once more and without hope, it was there that Junior and his henchman found him. Vince tried to run, but they caught up with him in an elevator, where he was relieved of a finger and shown a photo of Gen.

It was a testament to the fractured relationship between the brothers that all this time, Vince thought Jake had the money to get him out of trouble, but never asked until his daughter’s life was on the line. With Vince’s finger still bleeding and his shoes gone because he sold them for $500, Jake finally got a fuller picture of what happened in the last few years. Vince gambled away the money that he received from his share of the restaurant. Once that was gone, he went to Junior for a loan which he had not been able to pay back. He took out a loan against their mother’s house but he gambled that money too. That was when he skipped town, with his loan on Junior earning interest until it reached the current rate of one hundred and forty thousand dollars.

Vince could not believe it when Jake was forced to admit that he did not have the money. His flat was a rental, and he was already four months behind on rent. His Jaguar was falling apart. Jake enumerated his recent large expenses, including helping out Vince’s daughter Gen for a couple of months. Vince pressured Jake, for Gen’s sake. His alternative was suicide. 

Did Jake believe that Vince was suicidal? It was not clear, not yet. The bond between the brothers, however, was evident even through their bickering. Of course Jake was going to make every effort to help Vince out. 

‘The Black Rabbits’ began with a flashback of Vince showing Jake the smelly old building – the oldest bar in New York, according to Vince – that would become the Black Rabbit. Jake was at this time working as Wes’s manager. It was Vince who had the vision for the restaurant, something that was their own, whilst Jake, who had a presumably well paying job (he was getting 5% off Wes’s earnings) was skeptical. But, as they stood on the rooftop, with Jake cautioning Vince about standing too close to the edge, and Vince threatening to jump if Jake said no, Jake was already convinced.

It was a short scene, but it was a poignant demonstration of how the brothers enriched each other’s lives, at least, when Vince was not at a particularly messy turn of the wheel that was his fifty-two-year-old life. Vince was a charmer, a creative thinker, ruled perhaps more by his gut but he clearly had brains too. There was visible care in the crafting of the character, not just in Jason Bateman’s performance but also in the styling – the clothes, the hair – everything was giving cool guy whose life just did not work out. The disappointment of his life was written all over his styling.

Jake, meanwhile, was the brother who tried, and was not at all as successful as he sometimes pretended to be. ‘I’m 50 years old. I spend another year of my life closing that bar every night and, one morning, I just maybe won’t wake up.’ He was stripped down of pretense when he spoke to Estelle, as he tried to persuade her to design what he hoped would be his next restaurant, the Pool Room. The vulnerability he displayed to Vince later at his flat, as he admitted to not being the loaded brother that Vince thought he was, was more controlled, but it was still there, slipping out almost against his wish. 

In the end, Jake found himself in a far worse situation than when he was just trying to scrape the money to expand his business and improve his lot in life beyond counting pennies and struggling to keep his head above the water. He could lose the Black Rabbit. And how would Wes react to that, Wes, who was also part owner of the restaurant now caught in Vince’s mess? 

Rating: A-

Strays

🍽️For the second episode in a row, the show’s opening sound struck me. This time, it was the sound of a train slowing down, and drilling on the road. City sounds. New York sounds.

🍽️Roxie’s cooking, Estelle’s design, and the restaurant team Jake put together were all praised in the New York Times review.

🍽️Aw, that was a nice music video by Vince and Jake from their band days. There was a nice cut to Roxie in present day singing their song at the bar as they celebrated the review.

🍽️Vince noticed that Jake was attracted to Estelle, didn’t he? Jake was later shown looking at Estelle’s photos in his computer.

🍽️Roxie and Estelle were both impressed by the Pool Room. Jake claimed he had the money lined up; he had no intention of taking on Wes as an investor this time. 

🍽️Vince’s daughter Genny was a tattoo artist. Their reunion was not exactly warm, but not contentious either.

🍽️Anna posted a screenshot of the New York Times review on TikTok with Jake and Roxie’s faces drawn over and with ‘Beware’ written with red ink. Jake was upset that it could spook Pool Room investors, but Roxie was rightly concerned about Anna. They later met up and talked; as I assumed in the first episode, Anna was sexually assaulted. On the night it happened, a few of them were having drinks at the Black Rabbit. Jules kept trying to get Anna to join him, and she finally relented. Anna said she has been a bartender for 15 years, she could hold her drink, she has never blacked out. She did this time, and woke up on the bathroom floor with her clothes on a corner. She did not tell Jake what happened; someone named Tanya had previously told Jake of Jules’s harassment and he did nothing. Roxie, too, knew how Anna and the other girls were treated, and has never done anything. Roxie asked Anna if she wanted to press charges, but Anna said no.

🍽️Jake gave Estelle a hard sell on designing the Pool Room for him, and though Wes was adamant she was far too busy (with her own work, but mostly to support his, and he wanted them to start a family as well), Estelle later agreed.

🍽️Naveen showed up with his accountant Sheri to take a look at the Black Rabbit’s finances. Jake looked very uncomfortable with this, and managed to charmingly put this off a couple of days.

🍽️Roxie’s star was rising, Lisa from the New York Magazine was doing a profile on her.

🍽️Jake tried to talk his ex-wife Val, who came from money, into investing a hundred thousand dollars on the Pool Room, but she refused.

🍽️Jake asked Wes to put a card down because his bill at the Black Rabbit was already running high. Wes countered that he owned the place, but Jake pointed out that they jointly owned it. Wes brought up Vince showing up to ask him for thirty thousand dollars, and Jake trying to hire Estelle for the Pool Room (which he did not tell Wes about). Estelle mentioned that it was Jake who signed Wes up, and it was nice that we are seeing more of what their history and relationship was like.

Episode Title: The Black Rabbits

Episode Writers: Zach Baylin and Kate Susman

Episode Director: Jason Bateman

Original Air Date: September 18, 2025