Sports coaches in movies and TV series tend to be inspirational figures, often surrogate parents for the players they work with and leaders of the communities they represent. Even coaches who start out with personal problems, like Ben Affleck’s character in this year’s acclaimed basketball drama The Way Back, usually end up not only redeemed but also sharing that redemption with others. It’s a well-worn cliché, so there’s nothing wrong with the idea of poking holes in that image, and taking the expected portrayal of a high school sports coach in the opposite direction. That’s what creator Ben Hoffman attempts to do in the excruciatingly unfunny Netflix animated series Hoops, and he succeeds only in creating an extremely unpleasant character who isn’t funny to laugh with or laugh at.
Ben Hopkins (voiced by Jake Johnson) is the coach of the local high school basketball team in Lenwood, Kentucky, and he’s terrible at his job. The first episode opens with Ben yelling profanities at a referee, and that’s one of Hoops' subtler moments. Ben doesn’t yell because he’s passionate about his players or about the game; he yells because he’s a self-centered, short-tempered jerk, and he treats everyone around him with contempt.
That includes his team full of misfits and nerds who just enjoy hanging out together, his cheerful assistant coach Ron (Ron Funches), his world-weary ex-wife Shannon (Natasha Leggero), his vain former pro basketball player dad Barry (Rob Riggle) and his exasperated boss Opal (Cleo King). Some of them are kind of awful people, too, but Ben dominates Hoops, and Johnson’s voice performance consists entirely of yelling in the same exact register, whether Ben is complaining about his players’ abysmal performance on the court or rhapsodizing about his favorite movie Little Man Tate.
Ben’s obsession with Little Man Tate is the perfect example of the way the show runs a feeble joke into the ground. That this foul-mouthed, angry, inconsiderate coach is really, really into a forgotten ’90s family drama starring and directed by Jodie Foster is kind of funny at first, but the 10-episode first season of Hoops is packed with Little Man Tate references, all of which amount to only one thing: None of the characters have actually seen Little Man Tate, despite bringing it up constantly. Hoffman constantly doubles down on bits that aren’t funny in the first place, repeating them over and over again as if sheer force of will could make the audience laugh.
At least the Little Man Tate jokes are relatively tame. Most of the humor in Hoops is aggressively vulgar, a constant stream of swear words and dick jokes that come off as a desperate effort to appear edgy and transgressive, but are about as boundary-pushing as a 13-year-old boy who’s just discovered his first R-rated movie. Many of the characters actually are teenage boys, and their juvenile behavior makes sense within the context of the show, as they're trying to navigate the scary worlds of adolescence and high school. But Ben himself is just as immature and unfiltered. Instead of mentoring his players, he cultivates their basest and most vile tendencies.
Ben doesn’t need to be morally righteous for Hoops to be funny or entertaining, but Hoffman doesn’t give the character a single redeeming quality. Ben doesn’t deliver clever insults like Sterling Archer or reveal depths of emotional pain like Bojack Horseman, two narcissistic but fascinating characters in successful adult-oriented animated series. Ben (and Johnson’s histrionic performance as the character) so thoroughly overpowers the other characters that there’s barely any room to focus on any of them, and the players get one broadly defined character trait each.
Hoops' tone is just as contemptuous as Ben himself is, condescending toward small-town America, sports and the characters themselves. This could be something like King of the Hill with more swearing, or like fellow Netflix animated series F Is for Family, with its vulgar but heartfelt portrayal of emotional dysfunction. But it's not. Even when Ben is forced to take zen meditation lessons for anger management (after literally pushing a kid down a flight of stairs, and then laughing about it later), it’s just an opportunity for him to yell more. After he briefly achieves a state of calm, the ultimate lesson of the episode is that he needs to embrace his anger.
It’s a bit cathartic, then, when star player Matty (A.D. Miles) lashes out in one episode and calls Ben an asshole, but like all of the other characters, he just forgives and tolerates Ben’s reprehensible behavior after a brief moment of frustration. Matty is the closest to a layered character that Hoops has, with pathos in his broken home life and in the way he’s recruited to the team, solely for his freakish height and not for any basketball skills. But Ben spends the entire show pushing Matty around and taking advantage of him, just as he does to everyone else. The characters just sit there and take the abuse, but there’s no reason that viewers should have to.
Starring the voices of Jake Johnson, Ron Funches, Natasha Leggero, Cleo King, A.D. Miles and Rob Riggle, the 10-episode first season of Hoops premieres Friday on Netflix.