SPOILER ALERT: This article contains spoilers for “Deli Boys” Season 2, which premiered May 28 on Hulu with all six episodes.
“Deli Boys” Season 2 is all about Lucky in love.
At the start of the new season of the critically-acclaimed comedy, Lucky — played by the incredibly talented and impeccably dressed Poorna Jagannathan — and her witless charges Mir (Asif Ali) and Raj (Saagar Shaikh) are successfully running the DarCo cocaine business. But with their success comes a common problem among drug lords: where to clean all their illicit cash.
Enter Max Sugar (Fred Armisen), a prominent casino magnate and expert money launderer. Sugar is taken with Lucky from the start, but she does not immediately return his affections. Then, after Max helps out during an attempted robbery at the deli, Lucky agrees to go out with him.
“Lucky loves toxic, and she knows toxic when she sees toxic,” Jagannathan said in an interview with Variety. “She’s met her match in Max Sugar.”
As the season progresses, Max helps out Lucky and the boys, though he encourages her to leave them behind and look after herself.
“Lucky is just used to always having to be in the trenches,” Jagannathan said. “So she sees this man who is attracted to her, but also gives her protection and a level of power she aspires to.”
It turns out, though, that Max is not Lucky’s only love interest this season. Kumail Nanjiani guest stars as shady lawyer Danyal, who steps in to help get Raj out of prison after he is accused of blowing up Ahmad (Brian George). Danyal and Lucky were together prior to the events of the series, but his failures in handling Raj’s case led Lucky to deliver a memorable line in Urdu that was actually written by Shaikh.
“It’s, ‘Shakal dekh ke chod diya, akal dekh ke chhod diya,’ which is, ‘I fucked you because of your looks, and I left you because of your brains,’” she said.
Later in the season, it’s revealed that Max is prepared to sell out Lucky and the boys to Andrew Chadwater (Andrew Rannells), a district attorney who hates the Dars and is also running for mayor. When Lucky learns the truth, she wants to kill Max before the boys convince her of a different plan to take him down, take over the casino, and get Chadwater under their thumb.
“She finally understands that these two boys are the closest things to family she’ll ever have,” Jagannathan said. “They depend on her, but she’s beginning to depend on them as well, and they have really stepped up time and time again. They’ve never betrayed her, and everyone else really has. She’s settling into this three-unit a little more comfortably than she’s ever been, because she was so close to giving it away.”
And while there is still plenty of violence this season, it is noticeably toned down compared to the bloody events of Season 1. Jagannathan said that was a conscious choice by the creative team.
“I think there was a bit of a behind-the-scenes conversation on that, on instead of showing the violence, how do you see the violence on our faces?” she said. “It was a very, very interesting conversation on kind of the right tone, but I actually do think that it is visually less violent and it is emotionally more violent. I think the camera turned towards our expressions more than what was actually happening.”
Jagannathan also calls attention to a flashback scene at the top of Episode 5, which is notable as a mainstream depiction of Qawwali, a traditional form of Sufi Islamic singing. The scene features an appearance by superstar musician Ali Sethi, whom Jagannathan calls a “very old friend” in addition to being “one of South Asia’s biggest artists.”
She also cannot help but laugh at the memory of shooting the flashback, in which we see the Dar boys as young men.
“That was the last day of shooting! They both shaved, and I don’t know if you see it, but Asif has braces. I haven’t seen them look worse in my entire life!” she said. “We were all squealing from how awful they looked.”
Leave a Reply