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This article contains spoilers for Hawk.
At the beginning HawkIn Netflix’s new sports comedy set in the world of professional golf, Will Ferrell and Molly Shannon’s characters share moments. Ferrell, one of the most famous comedians of the century, plays Lonnie “Hawk” Hawkins, a washed-out PGA Tour professional trying to get back to the top. Shannon, an Emmy Award nominee and SAG Award winner, plays Ferrell’s ex-wife, Stacy.
“You haven’t been on tour in seven years, you brainless cunt,” Stacy tells Ferrell’s character.
“By definition, a cunt is mediocrity,” Lonnie objects.
This display of razor-sharp wit is some of the most original dialogue in the show’s first season, which aired Thursday. Almost everything else about Hawk feels disconnected from the other golf shows and movies of the past year. It would be one thing if these productions were good on their own, but given that they are not, Hawk It’s hard to watch unless you’re completely caught up in everything Ferrell does.
I’m obsessed with golf and try to keep an open mind when watching sports sitcoms with stars that don’t look good on paper. I didn’t really care Sticka golf show on Apple TV that portrayed the sport in an uninteresting way but at least had some grit and humor. I didn’t like it Happy Gilmore sequel, although I recognized the brilliance of the original. Both of these things mattered much more than Hawk does. Ferrell’s new show, co-created with old collaborators Harper Steele and Chris Henchy, copies these two already not-so-great works of art to create something even worse. It’s so bad that I think the Hollywood streamers should at least take a one-year moratorium on golf programming as penance.
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To be fair, this sport is not easy to translate to the screen. This is a problem even for live golf with dozens of players on the course at the same time and a limited number of pixels to work with. In film and television the task becomes more difficult. Golf is an acquired taste and develops slower than any other game in the world. (Last week I played a five-hour round, hitting the ball exactly 85 times, for a total of about 220 seconds of swing-related activity.) Making the game interesting through a two-hour movie or a 10-episode series like this requires not only a creative mind, but also commitment to the line. You can send a destructive character into a world full of straight men, like Adam Sandler did in the first film. Happy Gilmore. You can offer edgy depictions of country clubs with a hint of gambling drama, as in Caddyshack. You could even show a rom-com that combines golf and true love, in style Tin cup.
The point is that you need to try something. The last few years have brought a bountiful crop of golf shows and movies, but they haven’t been ambitious. Golf has become more popular since COVID, and this growth has convinced businesses and producers that there needs to be more golf content. YouTubers have had great success with this, but Hollywood’s efforts have been disappointing.
Netflix Full speed ahead The docuseries, which has had four seasons since 2023, is the PGA Tour’s response to Ride to surviveBritish series that increased the popularity of Formula 1 within the country. The first is fine, but has not resonated culturally outside of golf because golf is a very slow game, not a very fast one. (Golfers are also hesitant to say anything interesting on camera, and few people agree to be filmed in truly vulnerable moments.) Apple Stickin the meantime, tried to find his niche in character development: Owen Wilson plays a down-on-his-luck former star who returns to the sport thanks to his tutelage of a prodigy. Would you ever believe that Owen lost his young son or that the father of a promising boy turned out to be a deadbeat? Marc Maron, at least here, is funny.
Then there was Happy Gilmore 2which arrived last summer without worrying about any hint of plot. His goal was to upload as many expensive episodes and skits as possible in a couple of hours – and perhaps help Sandler land the role of MC at Taylor Swift’s wedding. If seeing a shirtless Travis Kelce being attacked by a bear wasn’t enough for you, there wasn’t much else in the movie. Genius of the first Happytwo decades ago was that he created a golf culture that was ripe for it. In the sequel, they didn’t want to make fun of this culture, but to squeeze out the guest stars from it.
Hawk is a plagiarism of these unremarkable efforts. Lonnie Ferrella is a boorish jerk who is one major championship shy of a career Grand Slam of golf. Get this: He drinks too much and has a bad relationship with his son Lance (Jimmy Tatro, the great American Vandal). Lonnie’s wife is upset about his credit card debt and lack of taking their family seriously, a classic embodiment of the hallmark of recent golf programs – the divorced or dead wife. The cast’s most prominent black character is Ferrell’s caddy (Jimmy Walker Jr.), whose job is to die outright to give Ferrell’s character a reason not to show any introspection. He is essentially Chubbs’ replacement for Carl Weathers in the original. Happy Gilmorementor who falls out of a window and dies after Sandler surprises him with an alligator head.
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Ferrell’s character travels in a van, just like Wilson’s character in Stick. He meets his new caddy Sam (talented stand-up Fortune Feimster) in the Walmart parking lot, and Sam’s lack of golf knowledge becomes a wrinkle in the story, much like the plotline in Stick. There’s even a Wilson brother: Luke appears as the golf golden boy Ferrell’s character desperately wants to beat. Nothing seems original.
I think when this show first started, someone thought it would be interesting. Professional golf is easy ridicule if someone is motivated. Roughly half of the sport’s biggest names left the PGA Tour in the early 2020s to compete on a morally bankrupt and perhaps literally bankrupt tour financed by the oppressive government of Saudi Arabia. The players who remain on the PGA Tour are largely uninteresting figures who demanded to be paid more money after the Saudis distorted the talent market by invading it like an irrational nation-state. At its best, golf seems overly arrogant and full of goals trying to achieve a goal. And Ferrell is no stranger to this alley: he’s done it. Talladega Nightsa mean-spirited but loving parody of NASCAR, in 2006. He knows there’s money to be made by taking a real shot at a sport with an insular culture. For some reason he doesn’t do that here.
Sometimes, Hawk Headfakes like this will go into such a fun and critical mode. Lance is a star player in the prime of his PGA Tour career whose fiancée (singer Kaitlyn Tarver) is a health care influencer who comes off as a funny joke on golf’s “WAG” culture. Tatro and Ferrell’s characters briefly talk about the LIV Golf tour of Saudi Arabia in a way that makes you think. think more will come. (It’s not.) Tatro’s character is also addicted to sports betting, and it’s at least a timely arc. He Also cheating on your partner, which is quite appropriate in this sport. But in episode four, PGA Tour bigwigs consider how they could stop Lonnie from returning to the tour on the grounds that his fans are “beer-drinking idiots in cut-off jeans and flip-flops.” That’s not entirely correct, because the real PGA Tour now goes out of its way to attract rowdy, drunken fans whenever possible. (If you’re not familiar with the Phoenix Open, aka Waste Management, read it here.) Also, the tour board member who resents Ferrell’s character is just angry that he slept with his wife.
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10 episodes ahead Hawk sometimes creative enough to provide a little fun. Its final twist, set at Pebble Beach, is a good metaphor for the mental problems golf creates. But there’s nothing about the show that feels risqué, and it doesn’t touch on any issues that haven’t been covered in other underwhelming golf shows and movies lately. Ramy Youssef was involved with the project about a year ago when he left and reported creative differences with the team behind it. It’s unfortunate that Yousef made a wise choice, but I’d be happy about it if he wanted to try his hand at golf comedy in the future.
Please just wait a little. Golf needs a recovery period before Hollywood gives it another chance. The sport has endured several embarrassing years, fueled by the farcical desire of overpaid tour players to “grow the game” by taking Saudi money to play obscure tournaments in places like Riyadh and Westfield, Indiana. During the golf gold rush, many people with business backgrounds concluded that the masses would fall in love with the sport once they saw how accessible it was. Acting out of a strange desire to imbue golf with a kind of faux populism, too many of these types (and too many movie producers) have tried to emulsify the game into the same unattractive paste. These attempts to bring the sport to the masses must be stopped for a while, at least until someone comes up with a more inventive option. approach.