The final season of the IFC series about a debauched play-by-play man takes an eccentric but well-timed leap into the future.
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You’re being pushed a lot by TV right now – shows to comfort you, shows to remind you what a mess the world is. For a show that shares the difference, try IFC’s Brockmire: a sharp-tongued baseball comedy that takes a strange and oddly prescient dystopian turn in its fourth and final season.
The eight-part season (beginning Wednesday) culminates in the comeback of formerly disgraced baseball announcer Jim Brockmire (Hank Azaria). He had already returned from a period of Asian debauchery to minor league announcement and season three to sobriety and the major leagues after an on-air crisis that ended his career.
The show could have ended well there, but Azaria and creator and head writer, Joel Church-Cooper, decided to stick with it and take it on a tangent. Season 4 skips ahead 10 years and installs Brockmire as the new commissioner of baseball. The prisoner officially heads the institution.
The twist is part of an endgame retooling by Church-Cooper that skews the show but is also prescient amid the Covid-19 panic. Baseball owners are betting on the lazy, thoroughly unqualified Brockmire because they’re desperate—the world is collapsing and so is their sport.
Victims of a Lassa fever epidemic are being burned in heaps, winter is a distant memory, and elective euthanasia is in the doctor’s office. Parts of the Southwest are a lawless region called the Disputed Lands. Baseball attendance has slumped as a bad flu season and ongoing Medicare blackouts are killing aging fans. In a poll of the 100 most popular sports teams among American 10-year-olds, the most popular major league team is 81st, behind a fifth-ranked Italian soccer club.
The best TV of 2021
Television that year offered ingenuity, humor, defiance and hope. Here are some of the highlights picked by the Times TV critics:
- ‘Inside’: Written and filmed in a single room, Bo Burnham’s comedy special streaming on Netflix puts the spotlight on internet life in the midst of the pandemic.
- „Dickinson“: the The Apple TV+ series is the origin story of a literary superhero who is deadly serious about her subject matter and doesn’t take herself seriously.
- ‘succession’: Being rich isn’t the same as it used to be in the cutthroat HBO drama about a family of media billionaires.
- “The subway”: Barry Jenkins’ captivating adaptation of the Colson Whitehead novel is fabulous yet grimly real.
Even as satire, there’s a lot of weight to be given to a sports comedy that’s essentially a character study, and longtime fans of Brockmire might not be happy with the changes. As the episodes jump from one opening day to the next, Brockmire’s successive game-reviving strategies – colored bats! Classic baseball! – Flame out, the level of wild energy and inventiveness isn’t what it used to be.
And while the focus of the humor has always been Brockmire’s dysfunction and his deliciously profane and educated rants, delivered with great aplomb by Azaria, the new season shows just how important baseball’s actual presence is — on the field or off the side seen announcer booth – was at the show. That’s because there aren’t any in Season 4, which takes place almost entirely in boardrooms, apartments, and bars. (Perhaps the budget didn’t allow for settling in a ballpark and hiring extras.)
But the series still has Brockmire, of course, which means it still has Azaria, who created the character for a short video for Funny or Die in 2010 . The concept – an insecure middle-aged man-child whose narcissism and contempt for the world are undermined and given a sort of underhand nobility through his sentimental attachment to baseball – holds. (It’s a very masculine thing, and seven of the season’s nine writers and director Maurice Marable are men.)
Brockmire’s softer side comes through more this season as his sobriety persists and he unexpectedly becomes a single father reunited with his Filipino-American daughter (a new character played by Reina Hardesty). He’s also reunited with his old flame Jules (Amanda Peet), the baseball junkie whose mercenary streak and epic booze make even Brockmire pause. Together they fulfill the strong woman role the show has always required, someone to take care of the big baby that takes center stage.
Brockmire is essentially sentimental – baseball stories almost always are – and as it moves toward a happy ending, the plot machinery can become a little obvious, like an outside slider on a 1-2 count. You may also tire of Jules’ repeated and increasingly unlikely willingness to forgive Brockmire for his outbursts and reversals.
But you’ll likely stick around for dialogue, still an unusual mix of educated, smart and rancid. I tolerate you as an owner just as much as I would try to befriend the nicest Aryan brother in prison. This sport will die like an old white man in a chair. Florida ruptured a cyst one day and they named it Tampa. (OK, that was a favorite from last season.) And in a special shoutout to Azaria’s homies in Queens, there’s Brockmire’s pitch to investors: Please buy the New York Mets. someone should. These people have suffered long enough.
