We should reboot Will Ferrell and see if that fixes the problem

There’s never been a better time for people who enjoy sports comedy. The Mindy Kaling basketball series, Running Point, just came back for its second season this summer. Ted Lasso will be returning for a revived season four in August. There’s Stick, the Apple TV golf series starring Owen Wilson. The Jake Johnson pickleball movie, The Dink, will be available on Apple later this month. It’s a banner season for anyone who wants to watch jokey weirdos hanging out while hitting, kicking, or throwing balls. Because of this, though, there is absolutely no good reason to watch Netflix’s new golf comedy, The Hawk. Whatever appeal there might once have been in a show where Will Ferrell dry-humps a putting green in an extended lip-sync performance of Sisqó’s “Thong Song” has vanished more thoroughly than a golf ball at the bottom of a water trap.

Developed by Ferrell, Chris Henchy, and Harper Steele, The Hawk stars Ferrell as Lonnie “Hawk” Hawkins, a washed-up star golfer who’s been coasting along in midrange tournaments for years while his son Lance (Jimmy Tatro) aims to eclipse his dad’s golf legacy. There are no surprises and no particularly notable features of The Hawk’s overall story arc: Hawkins experiences tragedy, is forced to reengage with his career, learns to make new friends, and eventually needs to reconcile his ambition with his role as a father. There’s nothing structurally wrong with any of that. The story moves along at a decent clip and between Hawkins’s struggle to return to the PGA Tour, his relationship with his estranged wife, Stacy (Molly Shannon), and all the business with Lance’s rise to golf glory, the episodes have enough material to keep chugging along. The problem is Will Ferrell as Lonnie Hawkins, an utter miscalculation of characterization and performance chiefly responsible for turning what could be middling comedy into an unbearable slog.

The Hawk’s issues begin almost at once. The premiere of the ten-episode season kicks off with Hawkins, late for his tee time at a lesser golf tournament, barreling into the country-club parking lot in his tour bus, accompanied by his trusty caddie, Old Henry (Keith David). “I’m a professional golfer! Look at my face!” screams Hawkins at the various tournament staff who get in his way. Hawkins and Old Henry charge onto the golf course full of bravado, shedding balls and golf tees as they go, completely uncaring about anyone else. They’re a world unto themselves and a shambling mess, and yet they’re so wrapped up in the routine of it that they sneer at everyone and spend much of the round discussing what chain restaurant to go to for dinner. Then, just as Hawkins manages to get himself out of a particularly dire bunker, Old Henry collapses and dies on the spot.

It should be the moment Hawkins wakes up. It’s rote as hell, but the intent of this opening sequence is clearly to spur Hawkins into reevaluation, letting him realize he’s been a self-absorbed jerk who’s squandering his life and needs to rededicate himself to his family and to the sport he loves so much. Instead The Hawk takes an admittedly lesser-trodden approach to Hawkins’s development: He just stays an asshole. A few scenes later, Hawkins hires a new caddie named Sam, played by Fortune Feimster, who he discovers hanging out in a Walmart parking lot and who knows nothing at all about golf. (The Hawk’s repeated references to excellent deals available at Walmart suggest that Hawkins’s trip there may have been about more than mere scene setting.) Sam’s primary purpose is to reinforce all the things Hawkins already knows and loves rather than to force him through any meaningful reconsideration of himself — the big life philosophy she imparts is to get himself something he likes rather than wallow in anger, because “delicious beats bullshit every time.” As a result, although Hawkins does have to do the required story beats where he betrays his friends and then realizes his mistakes, he comes out the other side essentially unchanged, just as self-absorbed and hacky as he was before.

Yes, Hawkins is an asshole with the same general shape and tenor of former Will Ferrell characters like Ron Burgundy or Ricky Bobby. He has a collection of physical quirks: His clothes fit oddly, 90 percent of his hair is an uncanny orange, and he wears a golf visor emblazoned with all-caps “Hawk” at nearly all times. He says and does brainless, juvenile things like those earlier characters, too — “when will men get a break?” he whines to his colleagues. “Are. You. A. Pro. Or. Are. You. An. Amateur?” he asks his son, standing next to him at a urinal and punctuating each word with a fresh stream of piss. He plays most of a tournament with one hand stuck inside a pickle jar. “My greatest fear is that a hawk one day will swoop down, silently, quietly, and fly right up my ass,” he says, after for some reason calling to a soaring hawk by yelling, “Meow! Meow!” But unlike the best of Ferrell’s earlier roles, Hawkins’s eccentricities feel like surface-level strangeness, connected to nothing surprising or soulful underneath. Hawkins is an attempt to re-create that Ferrell magic without any underlying investment in what makes this particular character unusual or appealing; he is a mood board of a man, and that mood is “manic childishness.”

Where has that earlier Ferrell gone, the one who could make painfully out-of-touch characters like Step Brothers’s Brennan Huff or Elf’s Buddy Hobbs seem more human and lovable than their grounded, mature co-stars? Hawkins, by contrast, almost seems to be thumbing his nose at the whole concept of existing as a complex, nuanced human being. Each deliberately tone-deaf line (about being gay, or finding your spirit animal, or any number of dick/ball/boner/hole jokes) only adds to the overall impression of a system collapse, the sort of cascading failure that can generally be fixed only by turning the whole thing off and rebooting from factory settings.

There is a model for the kind of comedy The Hawk seems to want to be. In its best moments, especially those involving secondary characters like Molly Shannon’s Stacy, Luke Wilson playing Hawkins’s preening nemesis Golden Fisk, and Chris Parnell as a member of the PGA Tour board, The Hawk resembles a Danny McBride show like The Righteous Gemstones or Eastbound and Down (which Ferrell co-produced with Adam McKay under their now-shuttered Gary Sanchez banner). In McBride’s work, collections of idiots and unlikable misfits strive for power and achievement and are inevitably foiled by their own flaws. When they do succeed, it’s often brief or so laden with depression or loss that any real victory immediately rings hollow. The Hawk, and especially Hawkins himself, would track better as a McBride-style comedy, but it can’t commit to the desperation and sadness McBride’s shows require.

Most concerningly, The Hawk insists on making Hawkins a hero in his own life. If the main character were Lance, or Sam the caddie, or even Golden Fisk as a guy who doesn’t realize he’s the villain, the whole perspective would shift. Instead it’s just a show about an unpleasant golfer who finds himself more funny than anyone else does, and whose fondness for puka-shell necklaces and “Thong Song” can’t fill in all the cracks where his humanity should be.