Nick Bakay has had a long career in TV. My favorite of his work is The King of Queens with Kevin James, Leah Remini, and Jerry Stiller. But his latest project, Bookie, recently premiered on Max.
The series stars Sebastian Maniscalco as a bookie, as you'd imagine. As the legalization of betting looms, his job becomes harder. No, this isn't Uncut Gems — even if sports betting is its focal point.
Bills Mafia
Bakay himself is a sports fan first and a sports bettor himself. A die-hard Buffalo Bills fan, Bakay had some words for the Kansas City Chiefs after their Week 14 matchup.
“It was wonderful,” Bakay said of their win. “You know, I'm having one of those years where I'm questioning why I watch the Bills, which is probably every year.
“My therapist recently said, ‘Because it's sort of the perfect mirror of your anxieties and angst in life — the outcomes, your fear of life is that things are not going to work out and they never work out for Bills fans.' Everything with the Bills ends badly,” he added. “We're like a film noir, [laughs] we're the film noir of football teams.” [smiles]
He elaborated that this comparison comes thanks to their four straight Super Bowl losses.
A Mahomes hater
Back to the Week 14 game, Bakay liked the fact that Patrick Mahomes was salty after the game. To put it lightly, Bakay is not a Mahomes fan, largely due to his Tom Brady-like nature. He called the game “delicious” because they got the flags they generally never do.
“You know, Patrick Mahomes has become the new Tom Brady in my life,” Bakay revealed. “People always say, ‘How can you hate him?' Well, I do! Because he hurts me, and I hate him.
“My eternal vision of him is always on the ground after being hit, looking at the ref, going, ‘Yeah, the flag's on them, right?' It's all I know of Patrick Mahomes, is him doing that, the ‘flag's on them' gesture,” he continued. “And it didn't work this time and watching him be outraged at the end of a game — and I'm sorry, I was looking at the picture today. [Kadarius] Toney was egregiously offsides. Sorry, those are the rules of the game. And the guy's been playing wide receiver his whole life.”
He added, “I knew how to line up on sides when I played football in sixth grade. So, it was glorious. [smiles] And the fact that we've had to play in Kansas City the last five games, come on, it was our day, baby.”
I mentioned my New York Giants fandom. While the Bills and Giants are in-state rivals, Bakay was rooting for them against the Green Bay Packers. (This interview happened the night of the Giants beating the Packers on Monday Night Football.)
“Don't tell anyone, [but] I got a little money on your boys tonight,” Bakay says with a laugh. “That shows how silly I am. I like 'em getting [the] points at home against the Packers.
“The Packers are too trendy now. That's how I bet — I like to go against the public! It's [Tommy] DeVito's night, buddy,” he said as we do the DeVito meme together.
A long road to Bookie
His love for sports betting is a major reason for the creation of Bookie. Bakay revealed that the topic of sports betting was “always an area that I was intrigued by.” So much so, that Bakay actually “loosely” pitched a Bookie idea for Billy Crystal's production company years ago.
The idea for Bookie has always been percolating, and Chuck Lorre (Young Sheldon) eventually approached Bakay for the show with Sebastian Maniscalco. Even from the initial talks, Lorre, Maniscalco, and Bakay envisioned Bookie as a multicam sitcom, much like his show, The King of Queens.
“Look at it, look at his (Maniscalco's) physicality, there's a weird hybrid to doing multicam well and Sebastian is that,” Bakay explained. “Something made us take a fork in the road.”
That thing was Maniscalco's performance in Martin Scorsese's The Irishman. In the film, he plays “Crazy” Joe Gallo and goes toe-to-toe with the likes of Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci. After seeing that, Bakay and Lorre pivoted to making Bookie into a crime show.
“We quickly deviated to — wouldn't it be great to do something different? Do something [with] a little crime, Elmore Leonard[-like]?” Bakay recalled. “And I said, ‘How about Bookie? Because I had been playing with it anyway. It took off like a rocket from there.”
Bringing Sebastian Maniscalco to the small screen
Sebastian Maniscalco's comedy is known for its larger-than-life scale. He's a very physical comic, with a specific dialect and rhythm to his jokes. One of his opening jokes in Bookie is something to the effect of “people annoy me.” It sounds straight out of one of his specials. Bakay revealed that this wasn't the intent, though, to bring Maniscalco's comedy to Bookie.
“You know, it was not one of those deals where it's like, ‘We're going to take the act and turn it into a sitcom,'” he revealed. “However, we really wrote this as a character. Danny (Maniscalco) and Ray (Omar Dorsey) are the core of the show and their relationship. We were hell-bent on doing this and we ran it by Sebastian and hoped he would do it, but we were going to do it.
“Now that being said, when you get a guy with this specific cadence and a voice [like] Sebastian's, you're an idiot not to try and get that genie in the bottle when you hear it,” Bakay added.
He would further elaborate by comparing it to his time on The King of Queens in the writers' room. “I've been doing that my whole career,” Bakay said. “When I was on The King of Queens, you didn't just pitch a line for Jerry Stiller, you pitch in character. And with Sebastian, that's part of the fun of it. There's a voice we lean into and it's been great.”
Kevin James vs. Sebastian Maniscalco
That led to a natural question. Having worked with both Kevin James on The King of Queens (and several films) and now Sebastian Maniscalco, how do the two compare? From an outsider's perspective, they have very different comedic styles. But for someone who has worked with both personally, they're actually quite similar.
“Both Sebastian and Kevin are really wonderful actors,” Bakay confessed, “and I really think the great comedic actors are great actors.
“I've always loved comedic actors. You know, Robin Williams is a guy [that] I liked in dramas better than I liked him in comedies, personally. The great ones can really act.”
He continued by comparing his experiences working with Jim Carrey during In Living Color, who, like the other comics mentioned, “can really kill it as comedians,” yet “there's a great actor in there, too.”
Uncut Gems
Sports betting has become more popular in the mainstream. One film to tackle it before Bookie did was Uncut Gems, the Safdie Brothers' 2019 film with Adam Sandler, another comedic actor with dramatic chops. However, that was not an inspiration for Bakay's Bookie, even if there are some crime elements involved.
In fact, Bakay's favorite film from the Safdie Brothers isn't even Uncut Gems — it's Good Time with Robert Pattinson. It's a film “right in my wheelhouse.” But Bakay attempted to not look at projects for direct inspiration. If anything, he reinforced that the tone was influenced y Elmore Leonard.
Unlike Uncut Gems, Bookie didn't “want to be crime and stress forward.”
Looking back at The King of Queens
Some of Nick Bakay's most acclaimed work came in The King of Queens. He not only produced the series, he also wrote and appeared in several episodes. His best role has to be Father McDaniel, who guilts Leah Remini's Carrie into giving him an iPod.
He disclosed that it was “really nice to hear” someone talk about the “underrated” King of Queens. If Bakay said the Bills are the film noir of the NFL, The King of Queens was the '86 Mets.
“We were like Lenny Dykstra or Wally Backman,” he joked. “We [were] scrappy, we'd get on base and then Darryl Strawberry would hit us home and that'd be [Everybody Loves] Raymond, you know?”
While The King of Queens wasn't the most popular show out there — Bakay claimed that the show has mainly caught on thanks to syndication — he thinks it still holds up: “A lot of people caught that show in syndication, not necessarily [the] first time around,” he revealed. “When I stumbled across them, they still really hold up for the most part.”
One of the key episodes for Bakay is the show's 100th, titled “Shrink Wrap.” The episode sees Arthur Spooner (Jerry Stiller) go to therapy. His therapist is played by the great William Hurt, “who was not the kind of guy you associated with doing a multicam sitcom to begin with,” Bakay added, “and he was great and had fun doing it.”
Ben Stiller, Jerry's son, also appears in the episode. He plays his father in the show in a hilarious twist.
Would The King of Queens still hold up?
But the eternal question for all sitcoms is would they still hold up today? Bakay thinks so, but he doubled-down and firmly believes that The King of Queens could still be made in 2023.
“Oh, 100%,” Bakay said of The King of Queens being made in 2023. “Given the day and age we're in, there was nothing egregious or offensive or cancelable.
“But also, first of all, Leah Remini, Kevin James, Jerry Stiller, if that doesn't work in any era, I think I'm in trouble,” he continued. “But secondly, I think it's an enormously simple, relatable, well-told premise. And I don't think that goes out of style. I really don't.”
As for the state of the multicam sitcom with The King of Queens' premise, Bakay identified a reason that it may have gone out of style. He attributes that to “very bland versions of that simple premise.” However, “when it's done well, I think it's eternal.”
If you need any further proof, Bakay points back to the syndication of The King of Queens, which continues today. Its charm and simple premise is “why the show is still in syndication [and] is still roaring ahead.”
Plus, the recent Kevin James meme proved the show's staying power. In fact, Bakay and James were recently texting about it — they think it's “hilarious.” So much so, that Bakay jokes it's reviving James' career for a “third act.”
What's coming next?
Currently, Bakay's got a full plate. The other co-creator of Bookie, Chuck Lorre, is working with Bakay on the final season of Young Sheldon. He executive produces the sitcom and is working on that last season “as we speak.”
Bookie put Sebastian Maniscalco in a new sandbox. Bakay wants to become the “Taylor Sheridan of gritty comedy,” as he said with a laugh.
His next project is aiming to cast Allison Janney. The two previously worked together on Mom, and she has become Bakay's “go-to” choice “because she can do everything and she's the inverse of what we were just talking about.”
He added, “You think of her as a dramatic actress who can carry the water in anything heavy. She's hilarious, too, and I learned that firsthand, but that was the joy of writing Mom was we had the horses. We had Allison, we had Kristen Johnston, we had Anna Faris.”
The way that Mom was able to shift tones from emotional to comedic is something that interests Bakay again. We'll see if/when Bakay's Janney-led project comes to fruition, but “that's where my head's at right now.”
Bookie airs a new episode on Thursdays on Max.
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