Bupkis: Edie Falco and Judah Miller on Entering Pete Davidson’s Reality

I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but Pete Davidson has had an interesting past few years. The Saturday Night Live alum wrote and starred in the semi-autobiographical King of Staten Island in 2020, released his stand-up special Alive From New York that same year, hosted his own showcase for Netflix’s first comedy festival, and voiced Marmaduke (he might want us to forget about that one, though).

But what you may be more familiar with is Davidson’s twisty, star-studded personal life. He’s dated Ariana Grande, Kate Beckinsale, Margaret Qualley, and fended off threats from Kanye West; he’s been to rehab, twice; he’s been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease and borderline personality disorder, and he’s publicly expressed suicidal ideations on Instagram seconds before deleting his account. While this makes for a turbulent, harrowing real life for Davidson, it’s provided ample fodder for the tabloids—and sadistic entertainment for the rest of us.

It’s these absurd personal experiences that Davidson brings to the screen in his newest series, Bupkis. Coincidentally, Davidson plays the character of Pete Davidson, a high-profile comedian living in Staten Island who looks and sounds eerily similar to high-profile comedian Pete Davidson. But it’s not Pete Davidson: the epithet of each episode reminds us that although what we’re about to see may seem like it correlates with real people and events, they are exaggerated, heightened, and so very totally not true.

Another indicator that the show is fictionalized? Edie Falco, who plays Pete’s mother Amy in the show, is in fact not Pete Davidson’s real mother—though the multi-Emmy winner knows a thing or two about being a dynamite mother and playing one on TV. Showrunner and producer Judah Miller, who worked with Davidson on The King of Staten Island, co-wrote the eight-episode Peacock series that finds the wayward comedian balancing familial obligations with professional ones, struggling with substance use disorder and grief, and, naturally, getting into high-speed, explosive car chases. 

Paste Magazine caught up with Falco and Miller ahead of Bupkis’s premiere (May 4th on Peacock), where we got a chance to ask the actress and showrunner about stepping into Pete Davidson’s unwonted world, where the title Bupkis comes from, and why we as a culture just can’t seem to get enough of watching celebrities rise fast and fall faster. 

These conversations have been condensed and edited for clarity.

Paste Magazine: I’d like to start all the way back with the genesis of Bupkis. When you were working with Pete on The King of Staten Island, when and how did it come together that you’d want to do another project with him?

Judah Miller: You know, Pete, Dave Sirus, and I all gravitated towards each other on The King of Staten Island. We have very similar comic sensibilities, and we just became fast friends on that movie. We stayed in touch after working on that project, and it was really during the height of the pandemic that Pete texted me out of the blue and said, you want to write a show with me? I was like, absolutely. And we just started writing episodes in this vacuum, almost as if we had the show on the air already and were going to make it, which I think is part of what made us free to give this show kind of a boundless permission to be whatever it wants to be. I think the show’s sense of anarchy and shifting tone is part of that, because we were really just writing it with the rule that whatever made us laugh the hardest would go into the series. 

Paste: There’s something really interesting about how the show has these absurdist fantastical elements but also covers more difficult themes about addiction and grief. How did you go about striking the right tone and figuring out how to balance those things?

Miller: It really just was a matter of not wanting to limit what the show could do in any way. And I don’t think that we were like, trying to calibrate, you know, how much absurdity or how much drama to go with. In crafting each of these episodes, we wanted to explore different themes and whatever was the most fruitful—whatever made us laugh the hardest or feel the most—was our metric to go by. Even going into it, I don’t know if we expected in some ways how warm and dramatic the show was going to end up being. But in terms of not placing any barriers and, you know, being boundless and having a sense of anarchy, this allowed us to sort of go in any direction that we felt like going to at any moment.

Paste: It sounds like you really put the comedy and the fun of writing first and then the human elements stemmed from that.

Miller: Totally, totally. And I think that like, we had so much fun making this show, I feel like that sense of joyfulness comes through in the project, and I really hope that audiences connect with the sense of fun and playfulness that we had in making it.

Paste: When you were putting this project together, how did you go about deciding how you wanted to portray this character of Pete compared to real-life Pete?

Miller: It’s interesting. I mean, within each episode, there is an underlayer of a real dynamic that keeps to actual life, and then I think that in order to pursue comedy, pursue drama, we end up sometimes heightening things. But the interesting thing is that we’re not really exaggerating things all that much [laughs]. Pete’s life as a baseline is pretty absurd and seemingly endlessly escalating, so we actually didn’t have to exaggerate things that much. But that being said, in crafting a dramatic arc for his character, we do take liberties. This is not a docu-series, this is not a reality show about Pete in any way. But I think there’s a truthfulness to the emotional core of some of the issues he’s dealing with. I think that’s what makes this show so emotionally satisfying. 

Paste: The show covers this idea of the absurd roles that celebrity status can take on a person. I’m wondering, in a larger sense, where do you think we are as a culture with obsessing over celebrities, but also wanting to see them being torn down?

Miller: I mean, it’s an interesting thing in the world where more and more people are becoming public figures in new and different ways through technology. I think that everyone can relate to wanting to have meaningful relationships with their friends and family and the people that are actually in their lives, versus the public interactions that everyone has these days through social media. So I think that the disparity between a public self and a personal self is something that everyone can relate to, and I think that that’s part of what makes this series so relatable, despite the fact that it is dealing with a guy who’s a world-famous comedian.

Paste: Lastly, can you tell me the story behind the title Bupkis, and where that came from?

Miller: Yeah, “bupkis” was an idea that Pete had for the show. Pete’s grandfather [played by Joe Pesci] is a big character in the series, and Pete’s actual grandfather is Jewish and uses the term “bupkis,” a Yiddish term that means “nothing” or can be “nonsense.” To use it in a sentence, it’s like, “You don’t know bupkis.” So maybe it’s what Pete’s grandfather would say, “You don’t know bupkis about bupkis.”

But it was something that Pete suggested, and it just fit and feels weirdly applicable to the show. And it wasn’t something that we could predict, that other people would allow us to name it Bupkis. But it seems to be a word that makes everyone smile, and so the network and everyone supported us in calling this show Bupkis.

Paste Magazine: So I want to jump right in and ask, when you first got the script, what was the entry point for you to get into your character playing Pete’s mom?

Edie Falco: Well, I am the mother of a son who’s 18, not 28, but still, the mother-son relationship is a very specific one that I felt like I had a handle on. So it was not really that hard, it wasn’t too far out of my wheelhouse.

Paste: In the show, you have such a nuanced dynamic with Pete’s character where you’re the mother to this grown man who also behaves so childishly part of the time. How did you go about viewing that dynamic and approaching playing both a mother to him who also lets him be an adult?

Falco: As in real life, it’s a tricky dynamic to know when to help and advise and when to step out of the way and let them find their way, you know? But also Pete is one of the most famous people on the planet and has a huge social media profile. Being the mother of that person is its own animal, you know what I mean? I wouldn’t begin to know how to navigate that. But as written, Pete’s mom was actually, I thought, really cool. She really seems to manage some of the insanity of his life with way more finesse than I manage my own 18-year-old’s life. I tend to panic and over-worry, and she was just kind of like, “It works out. Things tend to work out with Pete. Whatever. He is who he is and he’s kind of finding his own way.” I thought, as written, it was lovely and taught me a few things about my own parenting.

Paste: Did you get to meet Pete’s real-life mother, Amy, before going in to shoot?

Falco: I was given the opportunity to meet her, but I did not take it. I told [Pete], “I don’t want to imitate your real mom because I don’t know how necessary that is and she’s not necessarily the famous one, you are. And since this is sort of a fictionalized version, I would rather just play your mom based on the writing.” So it was less about imitating the way she sounded or the way she walks or whatever and more about just like, how do you parent this kid? And I approached it the same way I would any script. So that’s the way it went. I did eventually meet his mom, and she’s just one of the loveliest people.

Paste: Has she seen the footage? Has she told you about how she thought you did?

Falco: I don’t know anything, I have no idea! It’s a little nerve-racking, you know, because she might be like, “Oh, my God, I would never wear that!” or “No, that’s not what I would say to him!” or whatever. But having a movie made about your life by your son is already a headache, I can imagine.

Paste: I know in the past, you’ve talked about how you haven’t always had the opportunity to really consciously choose which roles that you end up with, and it’s kind of just based on getting the work. Would you say you’re at a point now where you’re able to have a little more sway and make more conscious decisions about taking a role?

Falco: It’s a complicated mix. You know, there are a lot of people my age who have been in the business for a while, and everyone has their own relationship with work. Like, I love working, I just love being on a set, I love what I do. And so, you know, I don’t take every job that comes my way, but I take a lot of them. Some are jobs that not everybody would take if they were in my position, but I just love being out there and doing stuff. I like to wake up in the morning and have a place to go and a job to do. There is still stuff that I turn down, but it also has to do with what’s going on in my real life now, or is there time, or do I need some time off? And so there’s a lot of variables that come into play. But frankly, I just love working.

Paste: Last question—what are you hoping that viewers get out of seeing Bupkis and watching it when it premieres?

I hope they find out that they were wrong about whatever they thought the show might be, because I think it defies description. It’s not like a show I’ve ever worked on or seen before. It’s a little mix of tons of different genres and has some great and surprising storylines. I don’t know. I hope they’re surprised and pleased.

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Michael Savio is an editorial intern at Paste Magazine based in New York. He is currently pursuing a master’s degree at NYU in media and humor studies.

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