Life after ‘Flatbush Misdemeanors’ for co-creator Dan Perlman

By Brian Braiker

Like what you’re hearing? Subscribe to us at iTunes, check us out on Spotify and hear us on Google, Amazon, Stitcher and TuneIn. This is our RSS feed. Tell a friend!

Dan Perlman is a comedian, writer and director in Brooklyn. He is perhaps best known as the co-creator, writer and star of Showtime’s critically-acclaimed comedy series, “Flatbush Misdemeanors,” which was sadly not renewed after its much lauded and pitch-perfect two season run.

Don’t count Dan out though. He’s still making things — short things, for now. Much as “Flatbush Misdemeanors” got its start as a web series he made with fellow comedian Kevin Iso, Perlman has made two short films — one in 2020 and one at the end of 2023 — both starring the same two New York kids, non-actors playing versions of themselves.

The first one, “Cramming,” has just been announced as the recipient of a grant from Rooftop Films so it can be made into a feature film. The second, “Practice Space,” will have its world premier at the Lower East Side Film Festival this year, that announcement just dropped today.

This week I’m joined by the very funny Dan Perlman on “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” to discuss the two shorts and how he connected with its young stars Alex Chavez and Yan Bo Lin. We also talk about “Flatbush Misdemeanors” and what he learned from that experience. We talk about the awkwardness (and comedy gold) of male friendship, and we talk about his stint as a Costco mattress salesman … among other things.

The following is a transcript of our conversation, which airs as an episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast,” edited for clarity. Listen in the player above or wherever you get your podcasts.

You are a rare recidivist. I don’t think we’ve done too many podcasts with the same person more than once, but you have been on this podcast, yeah, two years ago was with the cast of Flatbush Misdemeanors. We did a live recording. That was a lot of fun. We’re here to discuss your post-“Flatbush Misdemeanors” era and what you’ve been up to lately. But I want to say that the very last episode we had on this podcast was with one of the Flatbush Zombies. So this is a very Flatbush-oriented show now.
When you type in “Flatbush” the first Google suggestion, autocomplete, is Flatbush Zombies and then once you go one below, then you’ll get to us.

You’ve gotta beat them at the SEO game. I don’t know how you’re going to do it.
Oh, I think they got us beat. They’ve been around a long time. We got two seasons.

The show was hilarious. I was a fan. It was smart. It had a lot of heart. It was nuanced. Were you ever told why it wasn’t picked up for a third season? Did they ever give you a reason or was Showtime like, “Not a good fit for us?”
No. I mean, Showtime was great. Truly and I say this, you know, full sincerity, all the execs we worked with — Jesse, Gary, Brendan — were like so supportive and good. And you hear all about bad network notes and this and that. But they could not have been more supportive. Truly, after the first season, one of the execs told me it was like the fewest notes they’d given on a season of a scripted show, which I think is a testament to them being happy with the quality of it, but also I think we’re very cheap. So I think that was also a big help.

A lot of running and gunning? You stole a lot of shots. Did you ever get busted?
We’re just more likely to be left alone. You know, “Game of Thrones,” they have to account for every dollar, but if you’re just running around with a camera a little bit, you know, it was all legal, but the stuff we were doing was not too exorbitant.

No CGI.
No CGI. But no, I think It came at a weird time where Showtime and Paramount [were] merging and all these mandates are changing. Because I think they canceled a lot of their comedies, like all in a short time. There’s always issues. But it truly, truly could not have been more supportive and would work with any of those execs on anything so I feel grateful on that.

Would you ever shop third season around or has there been interest from other networks or anything like that?
No, I think it’s just going to exist as it is, but it’s done. I do feel super proud. It started as like three episodes of a web series where we’re borrowing friends’ cameras and sneaking onto the subway and bribe the janitor to let us into a school.

How much how much did you bribe them or what did you bring?
I think we get like maybe like $150 or $200 maybe? And then his condition was, “Okay, but my son wants to be in it.” And his son was this 10-year-old white kid who looked nothing like … it didn’t look normal at all. We just sat him in the corner so we could just crop him out. We would be starting with a pan and it was totally shitty. But we paid him also. But anyway, but it was just a miracle we got it done in the sort of independent version of it, you know? Technically, the independent version technically was a mess. We were borrowing the cameras and it was bad sound and we couldn’t color it and mix it and stuff. But it had jokes and had the feel.

Yeah, people really like it. So it reminds me a little bit of the “High Maintenance” trajectory, which started as a web series and then HBO picked it up. What did you learn from making the show and like are you applying that to stuff you’re you’re doing today?
I learned so much. A lot of the experience I think helped. Doing stuff independently — and I say this when I talk to people who are starting out and creating stuff — when you do stuff independently, it kind of does prepare you. You just kind of like go through every situation. So you’re less likely to panic. The first season we had producers running around being like, “We have no money. We have no money.” And I would always be like, “You know, I’m used to having no money.” You know what I mean? Like I’ve never had a permit before. This is crazy. It wasn’t Showtime saying it, but it was like our production, in-house. When you don’t have many resources, you’re used to finding like creative solutions to stuff. And so.

I’ve been living that for like three years here at Brooklyn Magazine. So yeah, yeah.
Right, I’m sure. But I do think that lack of resources often helps. You find the most creative fixes and a lot of stuff that ends up being cooler and better, more creative than if you just had bloated endless resources and could kind of mail it in. But so I think I learned a lot from that. And then my favorite thing about the show was working with every department. You see how creative and funny and smart all these department heads are, and it makes your writing better. W e had a props department that was super funny and like, prod design that really got it. And all of that, their attention to detail, makes your writing better.

I was a little intimidated up front because there’s a lot of stuff I don’t know. I do comedy, I do stand-up, and I’m coming at it from a writer’s perspective. But I didn’t go to film school. I don’t know lenses. I don’t know shit like that. And so there was a part of me that’s like, oh, “Is it going to be embarrassing how little I know?” But then you realize, it’s OK not to know certain stuff. And as long as you can communicate, “This is the sort of feel, and this is the idea of it.” And you talk it out with these department heads who are great at what they do and you trust them and then the two of you as a group, collective, you land on a cool thing. And so that even just the difference between the first and second season just felt so much more comfortable with that.

It was an ensemble cast. It’s a collaborative effort across the board. You’re very good about sharing credit too.
I used to joke that I was just trying to like be the Steve Kerr of this thing where it’s like, it’s like, yeah, like Hassan Johnson and Kareem Green, like these are Steph Curry and, and Klay and Draymond. I’m just trying to put everybody in place. And you guys, you’re going to space it. And I’m just trying to see where everybody lines up well. I can’t do what they do, but I’ll try to arrange where everybody stands and stuff and then, hopefully, have us succeed from that.

Well, let’s talk about what we’re here to talk about today, which is these two short films. They’re short shorts. I mean, I just spent a very pleasant 25 minutes watching them back-to-back. “Cramming,” which, you shot in 2020, and then “Practice Space,” which will have its world premiere at the Lower East Side Film Festival. That’s being announced today. Both movies star the same two kids playing versions of themselves and they really are sort of like the same characters in both films a couple years apart.
“Practice Space” was this short film that we made in the in late 2023. It was just it was just kind of an excuse to make something. Because, you know, with strikes and development and everything so slow and everything always up in the air, it’s just kind of it came about in the same way that “Flatbush” came about as a web series. I just want to make something. And even if 50 people see it, it will exist. And and so that was the impetus of it. And then these two kids who I’d worked with previously, I just loved working with them. I loved this dynamic with people who I know and think it’s fun to write for and see versions of myself in them, but they’re also their own people.

I reached out to both of them and asked if they wanted to act. And then one of them, Yan Bo Lin, who is in “Cramming” also, he answered and he was like, “Here, I wrote this thing we could do.” And he sent me this weird one-man play he wrote about Neil Armstrong.

Oh, so he did, okay. Because that appears in the short and so he actually wrote that, that’s funny.
Yeah, right. And I was like, “We’re not doing this.” But I did use it as a prompt because he talked about like wanting to act since “Cramming,” but not really like aggressively pursuing it or having sort of the courage to. But and there’s just something that struck me as so honest and funny and adolescent about the idea of you wanna, but you’re afraid to act or you’re afraid to audition and put yourself out there in that way. But then in your fantasy, you’re Neil Armstrong, you’re a hero, everybody loves you. There’s this huge like dichotomy there that I think is very relatable in terms of your vulnerabilities. And so it was fun to kind of like take those conversations and his script and then mold it into something. And then with Alex Chavez, the other actor in it, it was so fun because Alex I tutored for a year in real life. He and I developed a close bond. Alex, who’s more introverted than Yan Bo and a little more reserved, his main note was, “I feel like you wrote this, this is more how we were four years ago than how we are now.” And that’s totally true. I was like, “That’s a fair note because that’s the idea of you that I have in my head.” And so having the script kind of like evolve and grow from conversations with the three of us.

So we shot it two days on location in Washington Heights, again, old school, all stolen and just kind of walking around to these cool spots at Fort Tryon Park and everything, have it feel very New York and also feel very kind of like what I remember as adolescence where anything is open to you, but also nothing is open to you. Like you’re just kind of floating around after school, you don’t really have a place to be. You’ll get chased out of anywhere. You’re in these nice spots, but you can only exist for two minutes. You’re in this weird kind of purgatory no man’s land always.

“Flatbush,” too, like a lot of your stuff, has these very lovely moments that are not integral to the plot or the story necessarily. But like you were saying, these two boys are sitting there, they’re talking to each other, giving each other advice, life advice, dating advice, play advice, whatever. And I don’t know if he’s a construction worker or a park worker or something, he walks up and he’s like, you guys gotta get out of here, it’s not safe. And then he sits down and eats a sandwich. It underscores what you’re saying about adolescents having everything open to them and nothing open to them. And it’s also just like a lovely moment that makes you chuckle a little bit.
Oh, I’m glad that hit. That’s Napoleon Emill, who’s a very funny New York comedian, Brooklyn comedian, who was in “Flatbush” also. And he was also in “Cramming.” This was such a nice thing Napoleon did where I had him show up in “Cramming.” There’s a scene on the subway where we sneak onto the subway, we don’t have the rights to it.

I was going to ask about that. Yeah, “That is definitely a stolen shot,” I was thinking when you were sitting on the train.
Totally stolen, but I like scouted it. So like, we got on at the first stop on the one train on South Ferry. So it’s the first stop so we could choose the seats we wanted. But I still kind of needed like a certain area as clear as possible. So I just hit up Napoleon and I was like, “Hey, I got this orange like MTA worker thing. Can you just come through and just stand by the subway door and just look like an MTA worker and just wave people off if they try to get on. I’ll buy you lunch.” And he was like, “All right, cool.” He just did it. And so then having him then use the same orange vest four years later in a different [situation] …

[Laughs.] It’s the same vest! Amazing. Yeah. You’ve mentioned “Cramming” a lot. You’ve got these two boys that are clearly good friends, you know, played by Alex and Yan Bo. And it’s apparent that Yan Bo likely cheated by peeking at Alex’s test. But you leave things ambiguous to the end, which I also, I love it when things do that. “Cramming” is being made into a feature. Is that?
I tutored Alex for a year and then he said something that kind of inspired the story. I asked him how some tests went and that I helped him study for it and he said, “Oh, when I was walking in to take the test, the last class was finishing taking it and one kid said it was really easy but another kid said it was really hard.” And then I was like, “Oh yeah, that was such a like moment.” Like when you’re in anticipation or you’re nervous about this thing that doesn’t really matter. And then, one kid is saying it was easy and another kid is acting like they’re going to fail when you know they always get A’s and somebody else is acting like they didn’t study but you know they did, and somebody else didn’t even know there was a test or whatever. It’s so middle school performative. It’s so indicative of character and how they’re trying to like project into the world on this thing that doesn’t matter. It has stakes in the moment, but you know, in hindsight, it’s so silly. Right, like nobody truly, like who cares?

Yeah, the year Napoleon did whatever.
So I just kind of wrote that scene and sat on it for a while. And then at some point I met Yan Bo

You’re selling mattresses at Costco. There’s so many questions I have about this meeting. You’re selling mattresses at Costco and his mom asks you to keep an eye on him?
Yeah, I was selling mattresses at Costco in Queens for three days. I had a temp job selling spring air mattresses at Costco. I was the worst mattress salesman you could imagine. I can’t think of anybody that I would less hire to want to sell mattresses.

But I mean, if you’re gonna buy a bed, you’re gonna buy a bed. How important is the mattress salesman?
I was banking heavy on that because none of it was coming from my hard sell. I’ll tell you that.

And it sounds like the set up for a porn plot.
A mattress salesman, yeah. Well, it’s weird because it’s Costco, it’s in a big floor. So it’s not even like people are, they’re just kind of passing through on their way to get shovels or whatever the fuck, you know? But so this kid comes in and he starts jumping on the mattresses and he’s just being crazy. And his mom’s exhausted and she was like, “Would you mind just watching him for a minute?” And she just leaves me with him for like a half hour.

Were you like, “What the hell?” Or, “Uh, sure.”
I was like, “Yeah, whatever. I don’t care. Like, I’m just waiting until five o ‘clock or whenever I’m done.” Turn it into a nursery? What do I care? But he’s being so funny. He’s like, “I’m going to help you sell mattresses. You, do you want to buy a mattress? You, do you want to buy a mattress? And he’s like, “I’m going to be a comedy star like Chris Pratt.” And he was like, “How long have you been a mattress salesman?” And I was like, “I don’t know, like two hours?” And then I was like, “I actually do comedy also.” And he was like, “Never heard of you. You know what, give my mom your name. My sister and I will watch you on YouTube later.” And so then I get an email from his mom’s email address, like from the whole family being like, “Hilarious stuff, Dan, hilarious.” He’s just so funny.

I was always way more like Alex, way more like shy, introverted kind of thing. Like funny, but kind of like within myself. But I was always friends with the Yan Bos of the world. Loud, kind of like performative, big personalities or whatever. So I was like, oh, they’d be fun to kind of pair up together. So I wrote that “Cramming” short and it was fun to work with them and then a lot of other kids who were great. And then some comedians who filled out the cast. Anyway, so we made that short in 2020. But then it premiered during Covid, so we didn’t get to do any sort of like in-person screenings of it. So that’s another reason I’m very excited for the Lower East Side Film Festival thing, because it’s like these kids, who’ve like given so much like over years. They’ve never gotten to see themselves like on a big screen in front of an audience actually enjoying the thing.

Well, it’s wild to watch them back to back because, you know, they age. You change so much in the span of three years or four years or whatever. It’s like you watch them grow up in a snap of the fingers.
For sure, yeah. And yet they’re still kids in the second one, you know? So I turned it into a feature script during the last year when there was a lot of limbo and strikes and stuff.

So is it going to be made into a feature. I’m assuming not with them.
No, no, they’ve aged out of it. So I’ll just, I’ve just used them as, inspiration. And inspiration means you don’t have to pay them. So I’ll be directing that. That’ll be my feature. Super exciting.

Again, watching them back to back, you know, it reminded me of Richard Linklater a little bit. Either “Boyhood” or “The Before Sunrise” trilogy, where you have the same actors over a span of a couple of years, obviously on a much larger scale. Is he an influence at all? It’s also got a similar tone.
I definitely like that. I literally had not until last fall seen the “Before” trilogy. And then I was just like out of commission one weekend. I think I watched all three of them in a day.

I recently watched all three, because I had seen the first one the most and the second one once or twice, but I’d never seen the third.
Is the first one your favorite?

Probably only because of when it came out and where I was in life and all that stuff.
I love the second one so much because, and again, maybe that’s just like the stage that I’m in but like it just has that nice mix of like they have some life experience but also still still some hope. I love the way I love the way it emerged that he was married. Like maybe like 45 minutes in or something it emerges because she brings it up. There’s something that felt so real about the avoidance of this elephant in the room. Just avoiding that because you’re with this person who you’ve loved forever. I’m always drawn to that grounded stuff. But so I love that like independent sensibility stuff, but then also I’m a comedian. It’s always like a thin line where it’s like you want to poke at the sentimentality or whatever without sandbagging it, you know? And I see some kind of people where it’s like, you’re uncomfortable with one vulnerable moment so you just sandbag the entire thing or needed to be too ironic to subvert.

Either that or you don’t want to lay it on too thick either. Both “Flatbush Misdemeanors” and these shorts, your style is very low key. And even your stand-up, you’re not one of these wacky comic guys.
Sometimes wish I was. Those guys are so fun to watch, but it just ain’t me, you know.

Almost everything I’ve seen of yours — whether it’s the shorts, “Flatbush Misdemeanors,” your Comedy Central special — the theme of male friendship comes up a lot. It must be deliberate. It must be something that’s fascinating to you. It’s like that space of awkwardness and vulnerability,
It kind of emerged like naturally. I’m obviously interested in it. It’s like an interesting space to play in. Obviously so much of the stuff we watch is about romantic love, but most of our relationships in life are not romantic. They’re these different realms of platonic relationships. Most of our lives, we’re not saying what we mean, or we’re shielding something, or we’re talking around something, or we’re not really just getting to the core of it, because we don’t know how to articulate it, or whatever the reason is, you know? And I think there’s a lot of that in male friendships. It’s just an interesting mix of vulnerability, but fear of vulnerability. That sort of like tension is always funny. It’s more fun to explore people expressing love and affection when there’s not an organic way to like do it. Conflict is funny. And so how do you find ways to delve into that? There’s nobody who can hurt you more than the person or people who know you the best. And there’s nobody who, when you’re young, you’re closer to than these close friends.

I also admire the diversity of your casting in general and the wide swath of types of people that you work with. And I don’t know if you do it you intentionally do that or does that happen organically? And talk about writing for people who are different than you or have different backgrounds. How is that a challenge?
I think it’s a mix. It interests me to write about other people beyond just myself. I saw this Toni Morrison documentary and she was talking about when she taught at Princeton and something she would always say was s”Everybody always says, write what you know, I am begging you, don’t. Please like write about somebody who you’ve never met somewhere, like somebody in Venezuela or somebody in the Midwest. She was giving them permission, to think about something beyond their own little lives. It always seems a little boring to me to just like start a thing with, “Well, there’s me, the center, the protagonist,” and then build everything around that, because inherently that’s going to be so narrow. And so I think when you kind of like start with these other characters and are able to find empathy for them and develop them as human beings, inevitably you’re going to flush them out and inevitably you’re finding how your experiences are similar to their experiences.

“Empathy.” I was going to say the word, but you beat me to it. I love that prompt. I had not heard that before. “Don’t write what you know.”
It’s obviously a thin line because the worst thing is, which you see all the time, people just write a caricature of a thing that is just based on their perception of somebody from stereotypes, from bad movies or whatever, you know? I love researching, I love like learning about a world. Like in “Cramming,” I was in a prep school environment like that. My two closest friends that I still keep in touch with from grade school were POC kids in this prestigious white prep school environment. And in talking to them, in both remembering their experiences, but also talking to them as adults, they can sort of crystallize their experiences.

All that stuff is so helpful to help just inform myself, inform the world and just make it feel true to them. That’s how you find good shit: Pushing yourself in a way where it’s fun when you don’t know the answer right away, you don’t know everything. Like, what you’re saying about “Flatbush” being super collaborative and the diversity within the writer’s room. With the Zayna character or Maya and her friends, I’ve never been a Black teenage girl. There’s nothing I could say to speak to that experience. And so having those people from Brooklyn who can just speak honestly to the character, and then we sort of find the emotional arc as a group, that’s great. And that’s what it should be.

Different voices make things better. I mean, period. The more the better. Where did you grow up? Where was the school? I know you live here, but are you not?
I live here, yeah, but I grew up in Manhattan, Upper East, where, and so the school was around there. I don’t know if I want to rat out of school.

When did you get into to stand up? What was the thing that propelled you to try that out.
I always wanted to do it from when I was young, but I wasn’t sure that I would have the courage to do it. I did one open mic when I was like 15. I just went to some bar and they let me in and they all just stared at me and I just bombed and I ran out, you know, and then I went to college. I went to Northwestern and I felt more comfortable failing when nobody I knew was within a thousand miles. So I could go into Chicago and bomb and fail and that was very freeing. And I could sort of get better and get comfortable that way. And I started writing sketches and stuff, but it was always in my head, like, “Oh, I’ll do, I’ll do comedy.” But I also, I studied education in school because I thought maybe I’ll teach. So that’s where that part of “Flatbush” came in. Cause it was sort of how I imagined my life would be without comedy or writing

What I loved about it is you don’t fall into that white savior trope in the public schools. It’s the opposite.
Yes. I viewed it as the opposite. Like he would be just demonstrably failing and well meaning, but so out of his depths. My close friend, Koshal, who did go the public school teacher route, who I talked to so much, especially in the first season. There is something to comedy, or any creative thing, you do need a little bit of that delusion of Charlie Brown kicking the football. “Today is gonna be better,” you know what I mean? And in stand-up also, there’s so much failure, there’s so much bombing and it’s a nightmare, you know? And so, but you have to be a little bit deluded to think this will get better.

I work in media, I know I have this delusion too. Like, this year it will be better.
Right, right, like maybe next quarter, whatever. You sort of cling to that, but you need to. With stand-up you meet the funniest people and such a huge range of people, and I’m so grateful for that because that’s how we met Kareem and Yamaneika, who played my therapist on Flatbush.

She is so funny. That was one of my favorite relationships on that show, was with your therapist.
That was the hardest the crew laughed, both seasons, was just her yelling at me. Like, I mean, like Roy Wood Jr. who played the principal, like all these amazing people. And that also helps because I’m not an actor. With stand-up you learn how to stay within your voice and be funny in your voice and, and be present also.

I listened to a podcast with you on it where I heard you mentioned that you auditioned to play Lenny Bruce in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” speaking of stand-ups. I take it you didn’t get the part.
Yeah, they went with an actor. They had the guy do stand-up and then they had him act. And I did well with the stand-up part where I’m doing some version of Lenny Bruce-ish stand-up and then they have him act in a scene with Miss Maisel and they’re like, “I don’t buy that part.” The first thing I ever auditioned for, again, I had only done comedy. And they brought me in to audition for some random thing. And, man, I was so bad. I was a couple years into stand-up. The casting guy was like, “Are you an actor?” And I was like, “No, I do comedy.” But it’s like he needed some explanation. He’s like, “There’s a reason you’re here and it’s not because you do this. So why am I looking at you? Are you a great dancer? There must be a skill you have that got you into this room that you’re not demonstrating right now.”

Typical day in Brooklyn. I know you’re in Flatbush now, any places you want to shout out, any local spots?
Oh, Lips Cafe in Flatbush.

We just did a whole piece on them.
Oh yeah, I saw. I reached out to Jamane, the owner. They are great and they were also so sweet when we had the second season premiere. They had an informal screening thing and it was just cool. It’s a small nice community space where they do all these amazing events. But also it’s like a family-owned, Black-owned business and just being able to watch it with people in the neighborhood …

Did it make you nervous at all? Beause you’re not going to get a tougher audience than the locals.
I was a little, I felt a little more confident the second season, but the first season I didn’t know. I was like, “If they hate it, I’m going to hear this every day. I’m gonna have to move. It’s always uncomfortable watching a filmed thing that you made because it’s just a cut that you can’t fix. You’ll just watch it and like, oh, “You could have lost a few frames there.” So when they laugh, you’re kind of like, “Oh, cool. I can’t get enjoyment from this anymore but I’m so glad you can,” you know?

Check out this episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” for more. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts.