Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Peacock
Pete Davidson knows that you’ll likely be coming to his new Peacock original series, Bupkis (premiering May 4), with some preconceived notions. In fact, he welcomes those biases. The premiere opens with Davidson googling himself, the search delivering a deluge of absurd headlines. Some are just fake enough to arouse suspicion (“12 Things Horribly Wrong with Pete Davidson”), and others are shockingly real (“Pete Davidson and the Rise of the Scumbro”). Right out of the gate, Bupkis takes aim at its viewers, asking us to reflect upon which of these we may have seen, and which ones we may have even agreed with.
Some might try to defy this trick, to place themselves above the gossip that likely brought Davidson into their pop-cultural consciousness in the first place. The show has plans for how to address them too, ending its cold open with a scene so surprisingly grotesque that it’s begging viewers to sympathize with the most vicious of headlines. Throughout its eight-episode first season, Bupkis consistently straddles this line of reality in its (lightly fictionalized) portrayal of Davidson’s life and the whirlwind that surrounds his brand of stardom, with a surprising amount of candor and depth.
The show, on which Davidson serves as an executive producer and writer, initially appears to be an unnecessary retread of 2020’s The King of Staten Island. That film similarly had a semi-autobiographical sheen all over it. Though critics and audiences responded to it favorably, it felt like another standard dose of director Judd Apatow’s now-archetypal style and screenwriting. Ultimately, the film failed to properly dissect the perplexing charm of its titular king.