Do you remember back in the day when Will Ferrell was on Saturday Night Live and he used to do that recurring sketch as Lonnie “The Hawk” Hawkins? The whole bit was that The Hawk was the greatest golfer alive – and he was – but he was also a heavily suntanned, bleached hair madman who danced to popular songs, would spar with his ex-wife Stacy (Molly Shannon) who both loved him and hated him, and Chris Parnell’s PGA Tour head Anton would try to get The Hawk kicked off the tour. It even had its own title card, and a quick little theme song (“They call him The Hawk… He’s the greatest golfer in the world,” they’d sing)?
…Well, here’s the thing. There was no recurring “The Hawk” sketch on SNL, but there is a new show starring the aforementioned trio on Netflix titled The Hawk. And if you couldn’t figure it out from my tortured intro, the series plays out like one of those sketch-to-movies we frequently got in the ‘90s, ranging from It’s Pat to Ferrell’s own Night at the Roxbury. Only instead of a 90-minute movie, The Hawk is stretched out to an infrequently funny eight episode TV show populated by extremely funny people working their hardest to make mid-tier material work.
Not to belabour the point, but The Hawk is an odd hodgepodge of other properties. Ferrell’s Lonnie looks like his Zoolander character sat out in the sun too long. The whole plot and tone is essentially Happy Gilmore, but with Ferrell in the lead instead of Sandler, and a happy golfer instead of an angry one. And Luke Wilson stars as Lonnie’s long-time antagonist Golden, when Wilson’s brother Owen stars in Apple TV’s not-totally-dissimilar golf comedy Stick.
Basically, there’s a lot of familiar DNA spewed all over the place (the sort of ribald joke Lonnie would throw out at some point in this show), all made odder by the fact that this show was announced back in 2019 as focusing on a rival tour to the PGA tour, and was originally created by Ferrell, Ramy Youssef, and Josh Rabinowitz. The latter two left the production due to creative differences, and what we ended up with is a much more straightforward sports story, with Lonnie working his way back onto the PGA tour to get a second chance at redemption against Golden, while trying to bond with his estranged son Lincoln (Jimmy Tatro), one of the current up-and-coming champs.
As usual with every sports TV show that employs the triumphant sports movie structure, from Ted Lasso and Stick, to Netflix’s own Running Point (the lone exception is Hulu’s Chad Powers, which has a much darker twist at the end of the first season), it mostly works. You want to root for the underdog. You want Lonnie to get back to the top, even though it generally doesn’t seem too hard for him to get there (a running theme is that he’s his own worst enemy). Will Lonnie get redemption, a second shot to take down Golden? Will he bond with his son? What about his estranged wife, who is currently with the effete and overly friendly Bradford (It’s Always Sunny’s David Hornsby, basically playing the opposite of Rickety Cricket)? Will they get back together?
You know how this all goes, and it works over the course of a sub-two hour sports movie. On the other hand with a five-hour-long sports TV show, The Hawk invariably spends a fair amount of time spinning its wheels. There are a ton of digressions that never quite amount to much other than time for Ferrell to do his tried and true bit of wearing tight women’s blouses or walking around shirtless while dancing to “The Thong Song” merely because it’s ostensibly funny to have a hairy-chested, slightly overweight man slithering on the ground to old pop songs. And it really isn’t until the last episode or two, when the show finally gets to the place we all know it’s going, that it ekes out some actual laughs. Part of that is likely due to the scripts finally figuring out the bits for the characters, and how they need to interact. It also helps that Tatro’s Lincoln goes from uptight anger to being a smaller, possibly dumber version of his dad, something Tatro is excellent at channeling. The show also ditches a lot of the regressive “it’s okay to make gay jokes if I point out I’m making gay jokes” humor that barely worked in the early 2000s to focus instead on being purely silly.
And perhaps more importantly, it figures out that the best asset of the show is a cast-member I haven’t called out yet: Fortune Feimster as Sam, a woman Lonnie picks up in a Walmart parking lot to be his new caddy after his old caddy, Old Henry (Keith David) suddenly dies. The show initially tries to make hay with Sam not knowing anything about golf, but the actual funnier bit that builds as the show continues is Sam is the only one 100% on the same wavelength as Lonnie. There’s no reason that the duo sitting outside and eating take-out Red Lobster should be as funny as it is, but using the improv term, the two just keep “yes-anding” each other until it reaches the height of ridiculousness. That plays out throughout the best scenes in The Hawk: it’s just Feimster and Ferrell riffing off each other, his over-the-top delivery delightfully gelling with her deadpan reactions and line readings.
Look, these are all comedically gifted people in this show. It’s hard not to like Molly Shannon playing the same mock anger/inscrutable attraction bit she’s done with Ferrell a million times before. Parnell is one of the funniest men alive, and watching him seethe about Lonnie to the point of breaking a glass with his bare hand is funny. Tatro, once he’s unleashed to American Vandal level and allowed to match the energy of everything around him shows why he’s been a breakout star the past few years. And not announced, but Patty Guggenheim – a breakout herself as Madisynn from Marvel’s She-Hulk – shows up in a brief, but extremely ridiculous role as Parnell’s wife, who Lonnie had a torrid affair with back in the day (and maybe in the future).
But despite all these folks working overtime, it’s tough not to think of The Hawk as a round of mini-golf, versus the US Open. It’s fun and pleasant enough, but not necessarily game-changing or memorable (other than the pairing of Ferrell and Feimster). Maybe this would have worked better back in the ‘90s as an SNL sketch spinoff movie; hopefully more Wayne’s World than Stuart Saves His Family. As is, The Hawk doesn’t soar, nor is it a hole in one. It just makes par.
The Hawk is on Netflix now.
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It def FEELS like Happy Gilmore, & I keep seeing people say it’s Happy Gilmore’s plot but it’s like people forget Happy Gilmore’s plot. He was never a famous golfer, he wasn’t a golfer at all. He was a hockey player. Who tried (& succeeded) to get good at golf.