The Hawk — When a Golf Swing Gets Stretched Into a Marathon
I’ve been laughing at this exact character for twenty years, so let me tell you why I stopped laughing about episode four.
Ricky Bobby wanted to go fast, Chazz Michael Michaels wanted a triple axel he had no business attempting, and Jackie Moon wanted one more season in a league that had already moved on without him.
Will Ferrell built a career on preening, delusional men chasing glories they’d already blown, and it worked, every time, because the delusion was drawn with real specificity, you knew exactly what these men wanted and exactly how badly they were failing to get it.
The Hawk hands Ferrell his first shot at carrying a scripted series, and somewhere in the writers’ room, the formula’s second half got left on the cutting-room floor. What’s left is the shouting without the specificity, and after ten episodes, that absence starts to feel less like an oversight than a structural flaw the show never solves.
Ferrell plays Lonnie “The Hawk” Hawkins, a golfer who was, we’re told, genuinely the best in the world at some point in the 2000s or 2010s, the show can’t be bothered to pin down even that much. One putt from a career grand slam, and then some meltdown of some unspecified nature knocked him sideways into a rut, the show never bothers to dramatize with any real texture.
That vagueness isn’t a small thing, a comedy built around a man’s spectacular unraveling needs the unraveling itself rendered in vivid strokes, or the redemption arc stacked on top of it has nothing real to push against, instead, Lonnie’s fall reads like a placeholder note in a writers’ room outline that nobody ever went back and filled in.
What’s stranger is that the show doesn’t just fail to make Lonnie likable, it seems to have given up trying somewhere around the pilot, his son Lance inherits the same arrogance, plus a gambling habit and an affair of his own, and Molly Shannon’s Stacy, despite throwing everything she has at the role, can’t make aggression and dishonesty land as anything but aggression and dishonesty.
There’s a version of this show where these people are flawed in the way that makes comedy work, the flaw generates the joke, the audience roots through it anyway. This isn’t that version. These are simply unpleasant people I spent ten hours with, and by the finale I still couldn’t tell you what the show wanted me to feel about any of them. Not rooting for them, not enjoying hating them, just watching, at a distance, waiting for a laugh that increasingly wasn’t coming.
The runtime makes the problem worse, and it makes it worse in a way that feels almost self-inflicted, there simply isn’t two hundred minutes of story here.
The back half of the season pads itself with dream sequences and tangential subplots that reach for a laugh and land somewhere well short of it, a whole episode built around a supporting character’s crisis that exists, as far as I can tell, purely to eat runtime.
Compare this to Apple TV’s Stick, which covers similar ground with a fraction of the flab, and the contrast isn’t flattering. Ferrell has pulled this exact trick off before, brilliantly, in two-hour movies, stretched to ten episodes, the same material doesn’t deepen, it just thins out, scene by scene, until there’s nothing left holding it together but Ferrell’s own commitment to the bit.
That commitment is real, and it’s the one thing I’ll give the show without reservation: Ferrell throws himself at Lonnie’s humiliations with total sincerity, and there are stretches, mostly early, mostly brief ,where that sincerity alone is funny, the same way watching someone fully commit to a bad idea can be funny regardless of the idea’s merits.
Molly Shannon deserves better than what she’s handed here too; she’s doing the work of making Stacy a person rather than a type, scene after scene, even as the scripts keep undercutting her with lazy shorthand.
But an actress working overtime against her own material isn’t a recommendation, it’s closer to a eulogy for wasted effort. Ferrell has already proven, more than once, that this exact formula, arrogant man-child, sports world, spectacular self-inflicted collapse, can be genuinely great when the craft underneath the shouting is doing its job.
The Hawk proves the inverse: ten episodes of vague backstory, unlikable leads, and subplots functioning as filler is a lot to sit through for a handful of scenes that land.
I’d rather watch Ferrell fail loudly and specifically than fail this quietly, at least a spectacular failure gives you something worth arguing about afterward. This one just gives you ten hours back, wishing you’d spent them differently.
Parental Guidance: The Hawk
Rating: TV-MA
Violence & Intensity: No significant physical violence, this is a sports comedy, and whatever intensity exists comes from humiliation-driven comedy and dysfunctional-family conflict, not action.
Language: Frequent adult language throughout, consistent with an R-rated-style Ferrell comedy adapted for streaming.
Sexual Content / Nudity: Subplots involve infidelity and marital strain; no explicit content, but adult relationship dysfunction runs through the show as a recurring theme.
Drugs, Alcohol & Smoking: A gambling addiction subplot drives one character’s arc; social drinking appears given the golf and celebrity-world setting, but no major substance abuse beyond that.
Age Recommendations: Best for adults, roughly 17 and up, given crude humor, an unlikable-protagonist tone, and mature themes around addiction and infidelity. This isn’t a family-friendly sports comedy in the Happy Gilmore mold.
