Netflix’s Black Rabbit, a New York City nightlife drama starring Jude Law and Jason Bateman, was filmed on location across Manhattan and nearby neighborhoods, a departure from productions that rely on cheaper cities or studio backlots. Premiering Sept. 18 on Netflix, the series follows Jake (Law), the owner of a popular NYC nightlife hotspot, whose life is upended when his brother Vince (Bateman) returns with figures from the criminal underworld, threatening the business and the image the club projects to its patrons.
Creators Zach Baylin and Kate Susman, who are a married couple, say they spent about 17 years living in New York before making the show. Baylin recalled peering from a home “catty-corner to a very buzzy restaurant and nightclub,” saying they were “completely intoxicated by it” and the New York downtown landscape at the time. Susman noted that later reporting surfaced about problematic behavior around that era’s venues, including the iconic The Spotted Pig, which closed in 2020 amid sexual misconduct allegations. The show nods to that era’s culture, weaving a composite of the city’s nightlife rather than a single, location-accurate replica of one spot.
On screen, Black Rabbit’s restaurant exists not as a replica of one exact place but as a composite drawn from spots they frequented in the 2000s and 2010s. The Spotted Pig, Minetta Tavern and The Dressler in Williamsburg helped shape the mood, they said, even as the show aimed to avoid a single “center of gravity.” “We didn’t feel like the New York we lived in has ever been accurately represented on TV,” Susman said, adding they wanted to show neighborhoods beyond the usual Manhattan skyline. The baths of the East Village, especially the 10th Street Russian and Turkish baths, are featured prominently as well, a nod to the way friends would unwind after long nights out. Baylin described the urban texture as a “magic trick that gets put on every night,” where the surface looks glamorous but the care and labor that keep it running happen behind the scenes.
Filming also spanned iconic NYC locales: the Brooklyn Bridge, the South Street Seaport, the Chinatown bus terminals in the Lower East Side and the Pool Room at the Four Seasons, which anchors the show’s sense of scale and history. “We tried to really cover the gamut,” Baylin said, underscoring how the production sought texture and verisimilitude by roaming widely through the city. The creators also pointed to the East Village baths and other neighborhood haunts as essential to the show’s DNA, not merely scenic backdrops but places that shaped the characters’ rhythms and the city’s nightlife.
The production’s commitment to on-location authenticity extended to a chance encounter that underlines the project’s real-world energy. Baylin and Susman recalled camped-out moments in front of David Letterman’s Tribeca apartment as the crew filmed. Susman said that Letterman ended up sitting behind the monitors and watching for a while, which she described as a “super cool” cameo in an offbeat way. She added that Letterman had reportedly been locked out of his apartment, explaining why he happened to be on the street that day. The moment became a small, real-life footnote in a show intent on capturing the city’s organic and imperfect glamour.
Jude Law as Jake and Jason Bateman as Vince anchor the drama’s central dynamic, with the city’s landmarks serving as a counterpoint to the tension within the club’s walls. The series’ design team and directors leaned into the tactile details that make nightlife feel both enticing and precarious—from the sticky surfaces implied by Baylin’s observation of nightlife’s daylight reality to the way different neighborhoods contribute their own energy to the story. The cast and crew’s willingness to shoot in places that are inherently noisy, crowded or intimate is part of what distinguishes Black Rabbit from productions that opt for sanitized stand-ins.
As Netflix positions Black Rabbit within its growing slate of urban drama, the show’s method—drawing from the creators’ lived experience in New York and weaving it into a fictional nightlife empire—emphasizes a balance between spectacle and underlying truth. The creators described a city that is at once glamorous and morally complex, where success depends on a fragile equilibrium between public image and private labor. By filming on location, the series aims to give audiences an immediacy that studio sets rarely deliver, a sense of being in the heat of a real night out rather than a recreated version on a stage.
The production’s footprint across the city—bridges, waterfronts, iconic eateries and intimate neighborhood spaces—reflects a deliberate attempt to let the urban environment inform character and plot. In that sense, Black Rabbit aligns with a broader trend in high-profile streaming dramas that favor immersive, location-driven storytelling over crafted stand-ins. The decision to shoot on the ground in New York, the creators say, was not merely about authenticity but about enabling actors to inhabit the city’s mood as the characters navigate the pressures and temptations of nightlife life.
As viewers anticipate the premiere, Black Rabbit stands as a case study in how modern prestige television can blend real-world texture with fictional drama. The show’s mix of star power, on-location filming, and a story that probes both the allure and the peril of nightlife offers a portrait of New York that is as much about the city’s energy as it is about its secrets. For fans of urban drama, the Netflix series promises a window into a nightlife ecosystem that is as dazzling as it is fraught, with the city itself playing a central role in the unfolding narrative.