Peacock's Irreverent is Tulsa King lite

It’s probably a bad omen when a crocodile devours the officiant at a wedding. But these things happen Down Under, with a scream and a tossed bouquet and, soon, a shoulder shrug, and then a “not another reverend’’ air of exasperation. So opens Irreverent, a twee, not-so-irreverent, premise-driven comedic drama that pits sunny, beachy Australian gallows humor against cynical American opportunism, and lightly roasts religious dogma with Mafia viciousness.

Paddy Macrae sets his tale in the fictional, wonderfully named Clump, a fill-in for Clump Point, that was shot, lovingly, sunnily, in Mission Beach, Queensland. The country’s Gold Coast imbues everything with an air of warm breezy bullshit that swirls through the tiny town’s stereotypical plot of petty criminals, slackers, and half-lovable beach-bum luddites. All of them marinate in endless blue sky and blonde beaches and breakfasts of Vegemite, along with the same quotidian frustrations as back here, on the other side of the world.

In Irreverent, Colin Donnell stars as Paulo, a kind of reverse Crocodile Dundee, a generically good-looking leading man, the kind to play as a perennial mom favorite on a network medical drama. (He was Dr. Connor Rhodes in Chicago Med.) He hits like a down-guide cable TV Ryan Reynolds, a dollar store Justin Theroux, with continuous five-o’clock shadow and smartass gritted teeth and a brow-furrowing air of annoyance as he half-heartedly grapples with questions of faith and humanity. Questions he wanted nothing to do with in the first place. In Chicago, he operated as some type of mafia mediator, one able to fall back on loose and affable charm. “You’re not gonna send me to heaven tonight, buddy,” he says to a would-be hitman. In that case, at least, he was right, minutes later ending up the last man standing over a mountainous briefcase full of someone else’s loot. He takes the money and runs, not stopping until his conscience lands him in the pitiful web of a hard-drinking ex-reverend in Australia. Paulo is capable of mafia negotiations, auto theft, pick-pocketing, and fisticuffs, and he even plays a little keys. But when he wakes up on the first day of lamming it, with his stolen wares missing, he needs to don this holy man’s discarded robe to begin a trail back to what he lost.

Yes, the premise makes little sense, in an almost impressive way. Just know that the basic conceit is the contrast of a pseudo-gangster-connected guy spruced up—in his “dog collar”—as a leader of a faraway flock. It is a fish-out-of-water mobster scenario, unfortunately premiering the same month as another, flashier one: Tulsa King, which features a septuagenarian tough guy turn from Sylvester Stallone. The difference, of course, is that that telling boasts one of the biggest Hollywood stars to ever live and two of the most gifted showrunner/writers of this generation (Taylor Sheridan and Terence Winter). A generous reading could suggest that Irreverent is My Blue Heaven to that show’s Goodfellas (both movies were released within a month of each other, both angles on the story of real-life mobster Henry Hill). But, really, neither are likely to leave much of an impression. While Tulsa scratches the boomer itch for muscly knowing swagger, this show feels like a whimsical early winter dose of sunshiney cutesy. Both feature a protagonist out of their element, snarky and bemused, doing what they know, and instinctively building new crews of sorts.