Ah, the American Dream. Step 1: Arrive in Philadelphia with $3 in your pocket. Step 2: Get a job at a deli. Step 3: Buy said deli. Step 4: Invent a ludicrously large to-go cup. Step 5: Use the proceeds to open 40 delis. Step 6: Diversify into the golf course and mango pickle industries. Step 7: Drop dead after taking a golf ball to the head, in front of your two adult sons, who have no idea that you’re a crime boss using your fleet of delis as a front for cocaine distribution.
That, at least, is how Baba Dar (Iqbal Theba) amassed his considerable fortune. The Pakistani-born patriarch (Baba is Urdu for father) gets his skull shattered within the first few minutes of the rollicking crime comedy Deli Boys, whose first season is now streaming on Hulu. Which leaves his sons, Raj (Saagar Shaikh) and Mir (Asif Ali), to claim their places atop a hierarchy of gangsters they’d been led to believe was a legitimate business. The brothers are both unsuited to succeed Baba for different reasons. Raj, the elder of the two, spends his days partying with his woo-woo “twin flame,” Prairie (Alfie Fuller), and squandering Baba’s money on drugs. A cleancut junior-executive type, Mir has an MBA; a high-maintenance fiancée, Bushra (Zainne Saleh), and ambitions of rising within Baba’s public-facing company, DarCo.
It’s only when the FBI raids the DarCo conference room while Mir is pitching himself as CEO that the brothers start to realize their dad wasn’t on the up and up. With the company shut down for various white-collar crimes and the family’s possessions seized, leaving the Dars broke, they resign themselves to rebuilding Baba’s empire via his sole asset that wasn’t tied to DarCo: the first deli he bought as a new immigrant. This is where the full extent of Baba’s criminal activities finally comes to light. Turns out, there was coke in the tubs of mango pickle all along. And the business partners Raj and Mir have always…
