Kate Susman and Zach Baylin – Photo by Jason Mendez/Getty Images for Netflix
It’s fitting Black Rabbit is set in the restaurant scene, because creators Zach Baylin and Kate Susman are constantly turning up the heat in the eight-episode series. If a situation can go wrong for the two brothers at the black heart of the show — Jake (Jude Law) and Vince Friedkin (Jason Bateman) — it probably will.
Jake and Vince are the founders of The Black Rabbit, now one of the hippest restaurant spots in Brooklyn: glamorous on the outside, rotting away on the inside. The Black Rabbit attracts — like the brothers — danger, including a gangster Vince owes money to, Joe Mancuso (Troy Kotsur). Brothers, food, and crime are a few of the ingredients that make Black Rabbit both an engaging drama and a lean, mean thriller.
Recently, Baylin and Susman spoke with What’s On Netflix about crafting their protagonists, building a believable culinary world, and writing the suspense and stress of Black Rabbit.
There’s a clear affinity for ’70s cinema in this show, like Sidney Lumet and William Friedkin: the grain, the wide shots, the sweaty intensity of it all. Did ’70s thrillers, in particular, inspire Black Rabbit?
Zach: Those are among our biggest influences. We talked a lot about The French Connection, Prince of the City, The Verdict, and a lot of Sidney’s movies – including Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead. Those directors told grounded, complicated morality tales that felt urgent to their time and were big movie-star vehicles, but within a real-world concept. Obviously, we had two amazing movie stars who were willing to go for it.
Kate, what about the bar and restaurant scene felt right for the brothers’ story?
Kate: When we started talking about writing a TV show together, we took a lot of inspiration from the bars and restaurants we used to hang out in when we were in our twenties and thirties living in New York City. It’s that feeling of being part of almost a performance, some great event that was happening every night, in kind of the sexy, intoxicating way that you could feel just being in a cool restaurant or club. We wanted to embody that with this.
We wanted to put people in a place where we’re on the inside, and then juxtapose that with what those places are in the daylight, when the lights come on — all the surfaces are sticky and it smells bad. In one light, it can be intoxicating and sexy, and in another, it’s like, “Oh my gosh, am I the person? Do I want to be the person that’s spending time here?”
Black Rabbit. Jason Bateman as Vince in episode 103 of Black Rabbit. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2025
What about New York City itself? How’d the two of you and the cinematographers want to capture the city?
Zach: In terms of filming and the way the characters are in the frame, a lot of that came from Jason and Igor [Martinovic], our DP, and the other DP, Peter [Konczal]. Obviously, there’s an anxiety that comes from shooting on long telephoto lenses and feeling the whole bustle of the city around the characters. You get the feeling that there are a thousand other stories happening while these two brothers’ lives are going on. I think that shooting style is evocative of that feeling of a million lives compressed into one block.
Kate: We talked a lot about dialing into each character’s point of view — talking about who the scene belonged to, which character, and how we were going to cover it. So it wasn’t just your master shot — you’re really having a character’s point of view. It gives it so much more subjectivity.
How’d you want to bring as much authenticity as possible to the bar and restaurant scene? For people in that world, what details do you hope ring true for them?
Kate: We went to great lengths to make sure that the details were right. Even if you don’t necessarily know how a restaurant runs, if you see something that feels out of place, that takes you out of the show. We had a ton of conversations with friends who worked in restaurants around the city.
One of the early plot points in the show is about a point-of-sale vendor who offers Jake a loan. It was about understanding from a friend of ours who owned restaurants here: how does money actually change hands? Where does the money go at the end of the night, and who is the person — the intermediary — that takes it from the credit card machines to the bank?
Obviously, that’s not sexy or something we necessarily wanted to depict in writing, but we wanted to know how that worked: how much money is going to be in the safe at the end of the day, who’s paying for the deliveries as they come, and if a delivery doesn’t come, what happens? We did our work such that it rings true. Both Zach and I were servers for years and years.
In what ways did you want the restaurant, The Black Rabbit, to mirror Jake and Vince’s personalities?
Zach: I don’t think it’s necessarily a food-porn show, but a lot of thought went into what the menu of this restaurant would be as conceived by Jake and Vince, and then interpreted and put into action by [the head chef] Roxy. We had amazing restaurant and chef consultants who we built a whole menu with, had tastings, and were swapping dishes constantly.
Black Rabbit. Robin de Jesus as Tony in episode 106 of Black Rabbit. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2025
How’d you want to explore the culinary world of NYC further with [the head chef] Roxy?
Zach: There’s a scene in the pilot where Roxy is at the fish market. She’s complaining to Jake that the bills haven’t been paid, so she’s had to go up there on her own to get the fish for that night. The guy who was in that scene is the real fishmonger there. We talked to him a lot about what is in season right now. What would be on their menu? What would she be looking for in terms of the right condition of the crabs she wants?
Jason Bateman summed up Black Rabbit well by saying, yes, it’s about brothers and the restaurant business, but it’s also a show about money in a bag and a gun. What did you both hope to achieve with the suspense in the show?
Zach: We wanted to test the limit of how long you could keep your foot on the gas in the show.
Kate: We didn’t want to have any filler. It’s such a luxury to have eight episodes of a show or more, but sometimes writers can take their foot off the gas and explore an alternate reality here, a different storyline there, that’s not adding to the plot and the pacing. We wanted to do the opposite: keep it on the rails, going as fast as it could toward our conclusion.
Zach: As a writer, you just want people to turn the page. You want people invested in what happens next, and that can either be because something emotional is going on or because it’s a cliffhanger or you’re in the heat of a story that a character is telling. But just having the hook in, that is what you’re constantly trying to set. We had a terrific writers’ room that helped us break the story, but having eight episodes allowed us to both set up things in the beginning that have tremendous payoff — at least for us — when you get to the end.
Music is of huge importance to Jake and Vince. They were once in a band called The Black Rabbits. Your music supervisor built a solid New York City soundtrack. How’d the NYC music scene influence the needle drops?
Kate: Zach and I saw a lot of live music when we lived here. We were huge fans of The Strokes and talked about wanting that sound, obviously, but also that stardom The Strokes had. We loved the scene they occupied in New York. For Jake and Vince, we wanted a band that had been somewhat on that trajectory, but maybe never crossed the threshold. Obviously, The Strokes are a huge band, and The Black Rabbits never made it big.
Black Rabbit. (L to R) Forrest Weber as Junior, Chris Coy as Babbit, Jason Bateman as Vince in episode 102 of Black Rabbit. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2025
How did [The Strokes guitarist] Albert Hammond Jr. end up contributing songs to the show?
Kate: Gabe Hilfer, our music supervisor, said, “Oh, I know Albert Hammond Jr. Do you want me to ask him if he’s interested in writing some music for your show?” We were like, “Come on, buddy. You can give that a try, but we highly doubt it.” Lo and behold, we got connected to him, he came in, and wrote two incredible songs for The Black Rabbits. Jude sings on those tracks as himself. Albert kind of coached Jude through a couple of studio sessions singing.
Zach: Jason and Jude both brought in a lot of their own musical tastes and references. There’s a lot of ’90s rock that seeped in. Meet Me in the Bathroom, that book and documentary that chronicles the return of a New York indie rock scene, was influential in thinking about the world that Jake and Vince came out of.
So much of their conflict comes from miscommunication. For brothers, it’s spot on. When writing Jake and Vince, what were you looking to explore between the lines in their relationship?
Zach: The thing is that these two guys know each other more than anyone else in the world. Jake, in particular, can try to put on this face that he’s got his shit together and doesn’t have the same questionable decision-making skills that Vince does. Vince immediately walks in and calls bullshit. You can present one face to the world, but when you’re with your family, those fabrications can be called out immediately. I think that all happens without any words.
Sometimes you write things overtly to make sure that everyone working on the project understands the intention. And then, in the best-case scenario, you have collaborators who help whittle those things away. You can get to a point where a line in the script can get removed, and then it just becomes an interaction between two great actors. That was a luxury we had with Jude, Jason, and everyone involved in our cast. They all wanted to go with a “less is more” approach.
Kate, especially with Jake, what did you find most satisfying about writing the unraveling of that character and seeing him further deepen with Jude’s performance?
Kate: Seeing Jason and Jude inhabit the characters deeply influenced us. We were continually rewriting, touching up, and polishing as we got to work with them more and know them as their characters throughout the shoot. For Jake, I loved watching Jude kind of titrate how much he was going to give. He has this exhausting arc of going from a somewhat put-together person to someone who completely loses it, taken down to the lowest of lows.
Jake’s charm and good looks often create danger or save him. No matter how low he goes, he is still very watchable, though. Was that tricky?
Kate: It was tricky all along because these guys do pretty horrible and questionable things. There was some scene we were shooting, and someone said, “Jake’s an asshole.” I remember Jude hearing someone say that and being offended: “Jake’s not an asshole. Why does everyone hate Jake so much? He’s got so much going on.” Which we felt too — we really felt for his struggles.
Obviously, he made bad decisions, but there’s humanity in him, too. Jude brought humanity to someone who makes a ton of bad decisions. You’re with him for so much of it.
Black Rabbit. Jude Law as Jake in episode 104 of Black Rabbit. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2025
What are your hopes for the future of Black Rabbit?
Zach: We love the show and the world and the characters so much. We just hope people get a chance to watch it, that it connects with them, and that they find it as thrilling and emotional and heartbreaking as we do. And then, I think there’s a lot more to explore, potentially, in that world.
Kate: We kind of wrote it as a closed-ended story, but there are so many other relationships and characters that we love. Who knows — who knows what will happen?
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
