The Hawk premieres July 16 on Netflix.
By Elazar Abrahams
The biggest problem with the new Will Ferrell comedy series is that it is not very funny. There are laughs here and there, especially in the back half of the ten episode season when things start moving with a little more momentum. But seeing Ferrell on screen again with people like Molly Shannon and Chris Parnell should be generating more laughter than The Hawk does.
Ferrell plays Lonnie “The Hawk” Hawkins, a once-great golfer trying to mount one final comeback and complete the career Grand Slam. Lonnie refuses to accepted that his best days are behind him, much to the chagrin of his ex-wife Stacy (Shannon) and his son Lance (the underrated Jimmy Tatro). Lance, meanwhile, has become golf’s new golden boy, which adds a father-son rivalry aspect on top of the sports comeback story.
That family material is where The Hawk sometimes seems to want to be taken seriously. There are moments about a son trying to live up to the expectations, damage, and absence of his famous father, and some of that material is convincing enough in isolation. Tatro has been funny for years online, and he has an easy comic presence that makes Lance more watchable than he might have been in lesser hands. The issue is that the show never quite decides how outrageous it wants to be, or how we are supposed to take any of it.
The Hawk works best as a full-on sketch. The funniest moments are the ones where the dialogue and behavior are so heightened that no real human being would ever say or do these things. It becomes almost Saturday Night Live in structure, with characters reacting in bizarre ways and the world bending around the joke. In those moments, you can see the better version of the show, one that fully embraces the absurdity of a delusional golf legend refusing to leave the stage.
But too often, it pulls back into something strangely grounded. That would be fine if Lonnie felt like a richly drawn character, but he does not. He is not heightened enough to be one of Ferrell’s great comedic characters, and he is not emotionally specific enough to carry the more sincere parts. He is just Will Ferrell acting relatively normal, with a few exaggerated quirks layered on top. Ferrell does not need to do a wild accent or go full Ron Burgundy every time he shows up on screen, obviously. But here, I never stopped thinking that I was watching Will Ferrell in a golf costume. He did not lose himself in the character at all.
The whole show depends on buying Lonnie as a legendary figure, someone who was once so dominant and charismatic that an entire cult of personality formed around him. As the opening jingle each episode succinctly puts it, “the greatest golfer in the world.” I never really felt that. Ferrell’s performance does not fully sell the idea of this guy as a faded sports icon who once had the world in his hands. Without that, the comeback story loses its charge.
The golf of it all may also land better for actual golf fans. The show understands the sport’s rhythms and psychology to some degree, and there are several cameos and golf-world references that will probably mean more to people who follow the game. I do not, so those moments mostly washed over me. If you are the kind of viewer who gets excited by the idea of Ferrell playing in the sandbox of PGA drama, tour politics, and aging-athlete ego, there may be an extra layer here for you. For me, golf was not the hook, so the jokes had to be, and they flopped.
This is a series that feels oddly undefined. It is not wacky enough to be a great lampooning satire. It is not emotionally sharp enough to be a great sports dramedy. It is not specific enough as a golf show to win over non-golf viewers. And most importantly, it is not funny enough to make those problems disappear.
There are worse ways to spend a few hours, and diehard Ferrell fans or golf obsessives may find more to enjoy here than I did. Otherwise, The Hawk is skippable. A missed swing.
I give The Hawk a C.
