By Hope Sloop

Less than three minutes into the pilot episode of Big Mistakes, a techno-synth interlude crescendos as Nicky, Dan Levy‘s pastor character, transitions from his pulpit to his parsonage and greets his secret boyfriend. The score that plays out over the scene, at first, feels jarring and possibly a little out of place, sounding more like something from Grand Theft Auto than from a comedy series brought to you by the same man who gave the world Schitt’s Creek.

As the episode continues, so does the hyper-specific sound and tone, keeping the pace and setting a distinct vibe that makes the quaint New Jersey suburb at the heart of the series feel like it’s the clubbing capital of the world. To use a dated term (forgive us, but at least it’s less than two years old), the score and the show are brat. Eat your heart out, Charli XCX.

To anyone who is a diehard fan of Levy’s previous comedic venture, tuning into Big Mistakes could feel like he dropped acid and took a sharp left turn from wholesome hilarious into anxiety-fueled laughs; the eight-episode Netflix comedy follows Nicky and his sister, Morgan — played by soon-to-be Emmy nominee Taylor Ortega (if there is a just and fair god, that is) — who get caught up in the underbelly of a crime ring all stemming from one big mistake. The show immediately sets out to tell an unsettlingly humorous story about siblings who are in way over their heads and make you watch scenes through your hands as you are to burst into laughter. For Levy, that could only be done with a score from Canadian electrocrash musician Peaches and composer Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum.

“To create a score that somehow simultaneously keeps an audience engaged and excited and thrilled, that doesn’t step on the comedy. I mean, it is the most daunting task you can give a composer,” Levy said during a recent FYSEE event hosted by Netflix. “Comedy is so delicate that if you remove, or if you tweak, or if you sabotage anything, you compromise the laugh. And we never wanted to compromise the laugh.”

The perfect example of this masterful collaboration between artists comes 22 minutes into the first episode as Nicky is attempting to steal a necklace off his dead grandmother before they bury her six feet under. As interruptions abound, an age-old classic gag that has often been backed by a laugh track or complete silence is met with a thumping beat and melodic record scratch sounds that make it feel more like Mission Impossible meets Challengers. The music continues as the episode jumps to the cemetery, where the intimidating Turkish muscle-man (Boran Kuzum) stands quietly at the back of the funeral party to watch. As Nicky attempts to eulogize his grandmother without getting flustered by the uninvited guest, he swats at flies and jerks his head to avoid the bugs, matched by the pulsating sound of orchestral beats.

Levy says that was one of the first real instances in the making of Big Mistakes that made him confident they could take a big swing and deviate from the traditional music that is associated with comedies. Somewhere in the process, it started to feel like the music was a character of its own, playing a distinguishable role in making the series an anxiety-ridden comedy that actually delivers solid laughs — sorry The Bear, but we all know you are a drama that occasionally has some laughs, not the other way around.

“When we discovered those hits on the flies, that was a pretty great discovery because to me, it was like I had never understood that music could add to the comedy in the way that something like that did. And it never took away from anything, and it never felt scary. It was just this wonderful carryover of the score and the scene, and they just worked so beautifully together, which is what scoring should do,” Levy explained. “It should make something better without it feeling too heavy-handed. And that, I think, was the first moment that I thought, ‘Oh, we could have so much fun with this score.’ And from that point on, I think we had a relationship to the way that music could work in this show.”

In an age where most banger television scores are reserved for dramas like Succession or The White Lotus (editor’s note: major exception to the rule in the form of Siddhartha Khosla’s Only Murders In the Building score, which is magic), it’s shockingly refreshing to find a comedy that isn’t afraid to go weird, go bold, and go big in a way that feels innovative. For a show that requires an ever-present beating heart to add that life-or-death feel, having a pounding hum support each episode adds so much to the already excellent series.

All of this is to say that as conversations ramp up about the comedies that deserve their flowers at the Emmys and elsewhere — Big Mistakes already received four Gotham Awards noms, including Breakthrough Comedy Series plus nods for Ortega, Levy, and Laurie Metcalf — it should be impossible to ignore a score that doesn’t just make the show better, but makes the show, period. In setting out to make something unique and innovative, Kroll-Rosenbaum and Peaches have given the world what should go down as one of the best television scores of the 21st century. It’s exactly what voters should be thinking about come Emmy time.

Big Mistakes Season 1 is now streaming on Netflix.

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