The Hawk: Will Ferrell’s Netflix show is so bad that we need to ban golf TV and movies.
Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
This article contains spoilers for The Hawk.
Early on in The Hawk, Netflix’s new sports comedy set in the world of professional golf, Will Ferrell’s and Molly Shannon’s characters share a moment. Ferrell, one of the century’s most renowned comics, plays Lonnie “the Hawk” Hawkins, a washed-up PGA Tour pro trying to get back on top. Shannon, an Emmy-nominated, SAG Award–winning powerhouse, plays Ferrell’s estranged wife, Stacy.
“You haven’t been on the tour in seven years, you dickless cunt,” Stacy tells Ferrell’s character.
“By definition, a cunt is dickless,” Lonnie counters.
This display of razor-sharp wit is among the most original bits of dialogue in the show’s first season, which came out on Thursday. Nearly everything else about The Hawk feels lifted from other golf shows and movies of the past year. That would be one thing if those productions were good on their own, but given that they were not, The Hawk is difficult to watch unless you are fully in the tank for anything Ferrell makes.
I am a golf obsessive, and I try to bring an open mind when viewing star-powered sports sitcoms that don’t look good on paper. I didn’t much care for Stick, the Apple TV golf show that depicted the sport in an uninteresting way but at least had some grit and humor. I didn’t like the Happy Gilmore sequel, even as I acknowledged the brilliance of the original. These things both had a lot more to them than The Hawk does. Ferrell’s new show, made with old collaborators Harper Steele and Chris Henchy, apes these two already-not-that-great works of art to create one that’s even worse. It is so bad that I think Hollywood’s streamers should adopt at least a one-year moratorium on golf programming in penance.
Alex Kirshner
Stick Misunderstands What Makes a Great Sports Show
Read More
In fairness, this is not an easy sport to translate to the screen. It’s even a problem for live golf, with dozens of players on the course at the same time and only so many pixels to work with. In movies and television, the task grows more challenging. Golf is an acquired taste, moving at a slower pace 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 roughly 220 seconds of swing-related activity.) Making the game interesting across a two-hour movie or 10-episode series like this one takes not just a creative mind but a commitment to a lane. You can send a disruptive character into a world full of straight men, as was Adam Sandler’s job in the first Happy Gilmore. You can offer a cutting portrayal of country clubs with a twist of gambling drama, as with Caddyshack. You can even trot out a rom-com that blends golf and true love, in the style of Tin Cup.
The point is, you have to try something. The past few years have brought a bountiful harvest of golf shows and movies, but they have not been ambitious. Golf became more popular in the wake of COVID, and that growth convinced business minds and producers that there should be more golf content. YouTubers have had a lot of success doing that, but Hollywood’s cracks at it have been disappointing.
Netflix’s Full Swing docuseries, which has had four seasons since 2023, is a PGA Tour–affiliated answer to Drive to Survive, the British series that jolted Formula 1’s domestic popularity. The former is perfectly fine but didn’t make a cultural ripple outside golf, because golf is very slow instead of very fast. (Also, golfers hesitate to say anything interesting on camera, and only a few people submit to being filmed during truly vulnerable moments.) Apple’s Stick, meanwhile, tried to find its niche in character development: Owen Wilson plays a down-on-his-luck former star who reengages with the sport through his tutelage of a prodigy. Would you ever believe that Owen lost a young son, or that the up-and-coming youngster’s dad happens to be a deadbeat? Marc Maron is fun in this one, at least.
Then there was Happy Gilmore 2, which arrived last summer without bothering with any pretense of a plot. Its aim was to load as many big-ticket cameos and skits as possible into a couple of hours—and, perhaps, to help Sandler land his role as the officiant at Taylor Swift’s wedding. If a shirtless Travis Kelce being attacked by a bear didn’t do it for you, the movie had little else. The genius of the first Happy, two decades ago, was that it sent up a golf culture that was ripe for it. The sequel wanted not to lampoon that culture but to squeeze out guest stars from it.
The Hawk is a rip-off of these unspectacular efforts. Ferrell’s Lonnie is a boorish dickhead who is one major championship shy of golf’s career grand slam. Get this: He drinks too much and has a lacking relationship with his son, Lance (Jimmy Tatro, of the great American Vandal). Lonnie’s wife is upset with him over his credit card debt and lack of seriousness about their family, a classic embodiment of recent golf programming’s hallmark divorced or dead wife. The cast’s most prominent Black character is Ferrell’s caddie (Jimmy Walker Jr.), whose job is to die right away to give Ferrell’s character an occasion not to show any introspection. He’s essentially a stand-in for Carl Weathers’ Chubbs in the original Happy Gilmore, the mentor who falls out a window and dies after Sandler surprises him with a gator head.
Luke Winkie
A Norwegian Soccer Player Has Captivated an Unlikely New Audience. There’s a Surprisingly Heartening Reason Why.
Read More
Ferrell’s character travels around in an RV, just the same as Wilson’s character in Stick. He meets his new caddie, Sam (the talented stand-up Fortune Feimster), in a Walmart parking lot, and Sam’s lack of golf knowledge becomes a wrinkle in the story, quite similar to a plotline in Stick. There’s even a Wilson brother: Luke shows up as the golf golden boy whom Ferrell’s character desperately wants to beat. Nothing feels original.
I imagine that when this show was early in its development, someone thought it would be interesting. Pro golf is easy to lampoon if someone is motivated. Roughly half of the sport’s biggest names left the PGA Tour in the early 2020s to play on a morally and soon-maybe-literally bankrupt tour funded by the despotic Saudi Arabian government. The players who remained on the PGA Tour are, for the most part, uninteresting figures who demanded to be paid more money after the Saudis distorted the talent market by barreling in as an irrational nation-state. At its best, golf is a little bit too stuck-up, with plenty of targets yearning to be hit. And Ferrell is no stranger to this lane: He did Talladega Nights, a mean-yet-loving send-up of NASCAR, in 2006. He knows there’s hay to be made by taking a real whack at a sport with an insular culture. For some reason, he doesn’t do it here.
Sometimes, The Hawk headfakes like it will get into that kind of fun, critical mode. Lance is a star player in the prime of his PGA Tour career, whose fiancée (the singer Katelyn Tarver) is a controlling wellness influencer who scans as a fun poke at golf’s “WAG” culture. Tatro’s and Ferrell’s characters do briefly talk about LIV Golf, the Saudi tour, in a way that makes you think more is coming. (It is not.) Tatro’s character is also addicted to sports betting, an arc that’s at least timely. He’s also cheating on his partner, something that does not feel out of place in this sport. But in the fourth episode, the bigwigs at the PGA Tour plot out ways they might obstruct Lonnie’s path back to the tour, on the grounds that his fans are “beer-drinking idiots in their cutoff jeans and flip-flops.” This doesn’t land quite right, because the real-life PGA Tour now tries hard to court loud, drunk fans whenever possible. (If you are not familiar with the Phoenix Open, aka “the Waste Management,” read up here.) Also, the tour board member with a grudge against Ferrell’s character is just angry that he slept with his wife.
-
I’m a Longtime Christopher Nolan Skeptic, but His Adaptation of the Odyssey Slayed Even Me
-
I’m a Military Historian. The Odyssey Movie Is About As Historically Accurate As The Lord of the Rings—but It Nails Something Crucial.
-
Apple TV Just Adapted a Hit Novel Into a New Show Starring Anya Taylor-Joy. It’s Unrecognizable.
With 10 episodes to unfold, The Hawk is occasionally creative enough to be a little fun. Its closing twist, set at Pebble Beach, is a nice metaphor for the mental challenges golf poses. But the series offers nothing that feels risky in any way, and it treads no ground that other underwhelming golf shows and movies have not covered recently. Ramy Youssef was attached to this project until about a year ago, when he left over reported creative differences with the team behind it. Unfortunately, Youssef made a wise choice, but I’d welcome it if he wanted to take his own crack at a golf comedy in the future.
Please just wait a spell, though. Golf needs a cooldown period before Hollywood gives it another shot. The sport has had an embarrassing few years, catalyzed by a farcical desire among overpaid tour players to “grow the game” by taking Saudi cash to play in obscure tournaments in places such as Riyadh and Westfield, Indiana. In golf’s gold rush, an excess of people with business degrees have gotten the idea that the masses are due to fall in love with the sport as soon as they see how accessible it is. Operating under a weird desire to imbue golf with a sort of fake populism, too many of these types (and too many film producers) have tried to emulsify the game into the same unappealing paste. These attempts to translate the sport to the masses need to be shut down for a while, at least until someone dreams up a more imaginative approach.
