Will Ferrell Isn’t the Only Reason To Watch Netflix’s ‘Ted Lasso’ Rival ‘The Hawk’

Some people only care about golf when someone in expensive plaid pants is losing his mind over a three-foot putt. That’s the whole appeal of the sport, really: rich men in tiny white gloves coming undone on a perfect green, one missed shot away from a full tantrum. The Hawk, Will Ferrell‘s first television comedy for Netflix, is built almost entirely around that kind of meltdown — and that alone is enough of a winning premise before Lonnie Hawkins ever tees off.

A bit of background on Ferrell’s latest meme-able disaster: Lonnie “The Hawk” Hawkins was the number one player in the world in 2004, a three-time major winner whose reputation has slid from legend to punchline. His body is telling him to retire. His heart insists he’s one stroke away from the greatest comeback golf has ever seen. One more major would complete his career Grand Slam, and Lonnie treats that long shot as something he’s owed by the universe. The series is created and executive produced by Ferrell alongside his Gloria Sanchez partners Jessica Elbaum and Alix Taylor, plus Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman‘s T-Street and a bench of others, with the PGA TOUR signed on as a partner. How a real sports organization agreed to attach its name to this guy is its own small mystery, but the result is Ferrell’s meanest creation yet, planted in a wildly uneven sports comedy that, thanks to its sharpest stretches, is still well worth the swing.

‘The Hawk’ Turns Will Ferrell Into Golf’s Biggest Jerk

The Hawk introduces Ferrell’s Lonnie mid-catastrophe, barreling toward a PGA stop in an absurdly oversized tour bus in a race against the clock that plays like cinema’s least dignified action scene. Within minutes, he’s cooing at a golf ball like some kind of phone sex operator and guzzling what is very obviously not water from a sports bottle. He maxes out his ex-wife’s credit cards and then won’t sign the divorce papers. He’s openly, pettily jealous of his own son. By the time the opening credits roll, the picture of him is clear: This is a man who cares about winning and, as far as we can tell, nothing else.

That single-mindedness is also the show’s way into golf itself, a sport it clearly finds both fascinating and ridiculous. The world Lonnie moves through is all corporate sponsorships, country-club snobbery, and grown men treating a bad round like a world-ending tragedy, and The Hawk is happy to let him be the ugliest thing in it. He’s not a fish out of water so much as the purest version of everyone around him, minus the manners. When the show trains its eye on that culture, on the branded tournaments and the polite cruelty of the people running them, it’s sharper than it is anywhere else.

The Hawk is clearly angling for the shelf that holds Ricky Bobby and Jackie Moon, but never quite reaches it, because it’s chasing a harder, sadder joke than either of those guys ever told. The reason Ricky Bobby worked, the reason Talladega Nights remains the high point of the Ferrell sports comedy universe, is that Ricky was a himbo. He was an earnest idiot too dense to realize he was torching his own life for a checkered flag, and that obliviousness kept everything light. Lonnie is also both an idiot and obsessed with winning, but the key difference is that he knows exactly what his obsession costs. He understands the price of every bad decision but just makes it anyway. That’s a bleaker setup, and a trickier one, because it asks you to keep laughing at a man who has run out of excuses. The son in question is Lance (Jimmy Tatro), golf’s designated golden boy and the living version of everything Lonnie can’t stand about the next generation.

Where Lonnie runs on liquor and Carrabba’s, Lance chugs creatine, cold-plunges his feelings, and meditates his way up the leaderboard. Tatro plays him like a walking wellness ad (with unacknowledged chaos simmering underneath), and the contempt running in both directions gives the show the bite it needs whenever the jokes start to sprawl. By the third episode, Lonnie has made the PGA cut and immediately blown an event, brawling with a bunker and nearly taking out an elderly spectator, while across the country Lance racks up win after win at a Charles Schwab event. The contrast of one Hawkins falling apart while the other climbs is The Hawk at its most pointed.

‘The Hawk’ Is at Its Best When Fortune Feimster and Molly Shannon Take Over

Lonnie’s one flicker of decency shows up as Sam (Fortune Feimster), a DIY mechanic he finds “fixing cars” in a Walmart parking lot and promptly hires as his new caddie, mostly because she tells him to eat a Milky Way every time he feels his blood pressure spike. The wary but genuine friendship between these two mismatched people is the closest The Hawk comes to a heart. Every scene they share makes the case for what this series could be if it trusted sincerity even half as much as it trusts a crass dick joke.

Molly Shannon, as Lonnie’s estranged wife Stacy, is the other reliable bright spot. Stacy has poured herself into launching a hard iced tea brand called Teed Off, and Shannon plays her as a woman who has decided every moment of her life, no matter how inappropriate, is a chance to move product. She turns opportunism into an art form, and she’s very funny doing it.

Is ‘The Hawk’ Worth Watching?

Image via Netflix

The trouble is that The Hawk keeps reaching for more than it can hold. There’s a whole rival subplot with Luke Wilson‘s Golden Fisk, the smug pro who has beaten Lonnie twice, plus Chris Parnell‘s tour board member, Katelyn Tarver‘s influencer fiancée, and David Hornsby as Stacy’s obviously gay new boyfriend, and the show piles on cameos and storylines faster than it can sustain any of them. The tone wobbles too, never quite landing on whether viewers are supposed to be appalled by Lonnie or rooting for him, which is a hard needle to thread, even with someone as charismatic as Ferrell filling his spiked golf shoes.

The Hawk doesn’t hit the giddy highs of Ferrell’s best sports comedies, and it’s missing the clean comic logic that made Talladega Nights so watchable, but when it’s fun, it’s really fun, and there’s a lot to be said for the fact that Ferrell, this deep into his career, still throws himself at a bit with zero regard for how he comes off. That level of commitment is truly impressive, and, when paired with the episodes’ half-hour runtime, it makes The Hawk easy to justify watching in the end.

The Hawk is now streaming on Netflix.