Lonnie Hawkins lives in a tour bus. He was the number one golfer in the world in 2004, and then he stood over the kind of putt he had been making his whole life and did not make it, and the twenty-two years since have been a long argument with that afternoon. When we find him he has parked the bus in a Walmart lot, where he meets a stranger named Sam and talks her into being his caddy. That is the first ten minutes of The Hawk, the Will Ferrell comedy that arrived on Netflix on July 16 and went straight to the top of the US TV chart while critics took turns beating it up.
The Putt He Never Got Back
The setup is old and the show knows it. Lonnie needs three tournament wins to earn his way back onto the tour, a number arbitrary enough to keep ten half-hour episodes in motion. Around him is a cast built to absorb a lot of screen time: Molly Shannon as Stacy, his estranged wife, Jimmy Tatro as his son Lance, who is now a working pro and better than his father ever admits, Luke Wilson as an old rival, Keith David as the caddy who used to carry his bag, and Fortune Feimster as the stranger from the parking lot.
What holds it together is that Lonnie is not likable and the show refuses to fix him. He is vain, he needles people who love him, and he treats his son's success as a personal insult. Ferrell plays him without the wink he usually gives an audience, which is the choice that seems to have cost him the reviews. It puts the show near another recent comedy about men who are bad at the thing they have decided to do, though that one let its characters off a good deal easier.
The Thirty and the Sixty-Eight
The numbers are worth sitting with. On Rotten Tomatoes the show is holding around thirty percent with critics across thirty-odd reviews, while its audience score sits at sixty-eight. That is not a small gap, and it is not the usual one where fans defend a franchise. Nobody has brand loyalty to a golf sitcom that premiered last week.
My read is that the two groups are grading different things. Critics reviewed a comedy, counted the laughs, and found the total low, which is a fair verdict. Viewers seem to be watching something closer to a hangout show, the kind you put on while folding laundry, where the pleasure is spending half an hour with a specific man in a specific bad mood. Graded as jokes per minute it is thin. Graded as company it goes down easy. It is the second time this month I have written about
a title where the reviews and the audience landed nowhere near each other, which is starting to look less like an accident than a pattern.
Thirty Years in the Same Car
Here is the part that reframed the show for me. The Hawk was created by Ferrell with Chris Henchy and Harper Steele, and Ferrell and Steele have been working together since 1995, when Saturday Night Live hired them in the same week, him as a performer and her as a writer. She went on to run that writers room from 2004 to 2008. They have made four things together, and the one just before this was Will and Harper, the 2024 documentary in which the two of them drove across the country for seventeen days.
Look at The Hawk with that in mind and its shape stops being a golf show. It is a man in a vehicle crossing America with a companion he did not have last month, stopping in towns that do not care who he used to be. The tournaments are a reason to keep driving. Whatever these two writers actually know how to do, it is this: put a person in motion, give him someone in the passenger seat, and let the road do the work that plot usually does.
Is The Hawk Worth Watching
I went in expecting to agree with the reviews, and I mostly do about the jokes. Episodes three and four sag badly. The show keeps setting up bits it does not finish, and Molly Shannon is doing better work than the writing gives her room for, which several critics noticed and which is a real complaint rather than a snobbish one. If you want the sharp Ferrell of the early sports comedies, this is not that, and it is not trying to be.
What I did not expect was to be moved by how stubborn it is. Ferrell turned fifty-nine on the day this premiered, and he is playing a man still chasing a thing that stopped being available to him two decades ago. The show never once tells him to grow up. It just keeps him driving. There is a version of this premise that ends with a lesson about acceptance, and Ferrell and Steele were plainly not interested in making it. Watch it the way its audience is watching it, in the background, an episode at a time, and you get something the review scores cannot hold: a comedy about a man who is bad at quitting, made by two people who have spent thirty years not quitting on each other.
