Maybe I wouldn’t be watching with such a critical eye. If I weren’t neck deep in the sports betting world myself, would I be so harsh? That’s hard to say.

Make Danny a drug dealer, or a car thief, or - like his sister, who is also his secretary/treasurer because all bookies have secretary/treasurers - a homegrown magic mushroom farmer, and the show really doesn’t change one bit. The rest of the one-liners fell flat, at least to my ears, and “sports betting” discussions and/or hat tips were pretty much just window dressing. It turned out to be a particularly topical exchange given the latest news regarding California sports betting, the ongoing attempts to legalize betting apps, and the tribal response to those attempts. “Oh yeah, the government never f***s over Indians.” “Nah, the Indian casinos will never allow it,” Danny replies. “Only a matter of time before California legalizes sports betting,” he says to Danny. He plays a marijuana dealer put out of business when the state legalized weed. I laughed once, for the record, and it was during a brief conversation between Danny and his Lyft driver, played by Jorge Garcia, formerly of Lost. Bookie, on the other hand, is over the top, lewd, and fugazi. The latter show, starring Michael Douglas and the late Alan Arkin, was understated, sweet, and true-to-life. This show is the brainchild of Chuck Lorre, he of Two and a Half Men and, more recently, the truly dynamite The Kominsky Method. Not to mention, every client doesn’t pay, and Danny and his muscle come up with increasingly wacky ways to gain entry into these people’s lives. Danny’s girlfriend, who he met during her overnight shift at - one guess - Binion’s. The muscle’s grandma, a sassy know-it-all. His muscle, the Black ex-NFL player who lost his millions and has fathered at least three kids out of wedlock. I’m also reasonably certain that the characters that inhabit the real world of street books aren’t straight from central casting. Now, to be fair, I don’t know a whole lot about the actual underworld of street bookmaking, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t usually involve Charlie Sheen, a potential murder, a suicide, a second kinda-sorta but not really murder, transgender deadbeats, magic mushrooms, $150,000 watches, hookers with attitude, a running “joke” about cash that smells like human feces, and the quickest car repossession in the history of mankind - and all within a roughly 24-hour time frame. The show stars Sebastian Maniscalco as Danny, a bookie in Los Angeles.

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