When did golf become the sport du jour for broad, daft comedy? It’s a trend that goes back at least as far as 1980, when Caddyshack infused the serene, well-at-heel country-club pastime with the rowdy irreverence of comedy icon Rodney Dangerfield. Sixteen years later, we got Happy Gilmore, wherein a rageful and destructive Adam Sandler pushed the juxtaposition one step further. Now, the swings are coming thick and fast. Last year we had Happy Gilmore 2 and Apple TV’s Owen Wilson golfing comedy Stick; Netflix's latest series The Hawk sees comedy vet Will Ferrell pick up a putter to play a PGA has-been in pursuit of a comeback.
The Hawk is familiar territory for Ferrell: one more sports comedy to chuck on a pile that already includes films such as the fondly remembered Nascar parody Talladega Nights, the dreary ice skating lark Blades of Glory, and the forgettable basketball pastiche Semi-Pro. Here, the decision to forsake the big screen in favour of a 10-episode streaming series attests more to Hollywood’s present aversion to studio comedies than any innate demands of the material, though – given how sparse the laughs are over the course of this run, and how thinly drawn the characters, it’s hard not to wonder if this would have been better crammed into a lean 90 minutes.
Lonnie “The Hawk” Hawkins is exactly the sort of character we’ve seen Ferrell play dozens of times before — a risible, flamboyant egotist, here festooned with a ridiculous platinum-blond coif and a repellent goatee. He looks absurd, and acts it. Fuelling his neuroses is the presence of his son, Lancelot, (Jimmy Tatro, the American Vandal star who has quietly become Hollywood’s go-to meathead jock). Lance is a real-deal golf pro, but when The Hawk starts mounting a legitimate comeback, it’s clear the insecurity flows both ways.
The problem isn’t that this sort of comedy cannot work as a series: indeed the problem may be that it has worked too well before. The Hawk owes chasmic debts to Eastbound & Down, Danny McBride and Jody Hill’s cult HBO series (released between 2009 and 2013) that also followed a washed-up sportsman drunk on his own hype. (David Gordon Green, who directed much of Eastbound, is an executive producer here and directs The Hawk’s pilot.) Eastbound, though, is a work of comic genius – inventive, carefully constructed, and legitimately cinematic at points, with a crude, nasty streak that’s not easy to pull off. The Hawk lacks Eastbound’s visual panache and its clarity of vision. Most damningly, it is just not funny.
Perhaps the biggest issue is that everyone is playing essentially to type – not just Ferrell and Tatro. Fortune Feimster, as Lonnie’s oddball caddy, is more or less the same filterless eccentric she played on shows like FUBAR or the short-lived Mindy Kaling sitcom Champions. Chris Parnell imbues his PGA board member with the same disarmingly perky smarm he’s been peddling for decades. Molly Shannon, as Lonnie’s estranged wife, is perhaps the standout, though even her withering scorn is nothing new. Nobody is really bad in The Hawk, but no one is surprising. And no one feels real, least of all Ferrell.
There may be a whiff of metatext to this whole series: like Lonnie, Ferrell is a performer whose glory days have seemingly passed. Where once he ruled the box office, now he’s grinding out a comeback on Netflix. What’s interesting, perhaps, is that the parallels end there. Where “The Hawk” was usurped on the golf course by his own ascendent progeny, there has been no successor to Ferrell on the comedy scene. Who are the big comedy stars of Gen Z? Who is the new Will Ferrell? This is not a position that’s been advertised for. If there’s one takeaway from this series, it’s that we need more stars like Ferrell – but no more shows like The Hawk.
‘The Hawk’ is available to stream on Netflix now
