Idiot Boxing: Brockmire, season 4 (2020)

Jim dotes on Beth - the daughter he didn't know he had until
she showed up on his doorstep when she was eight years old.
There is a certain sweetness to their relationship, but it is
often lost amidst a season that was overly busy.

This show really swung for the fences with this final season, and ended up hitting a sacrifice, dribbling fielder's choice. It's a "productive" play that gets the run home, but it wasn't as strong as the first three seasons.

At the end of season 3, Brockmire had embraced sobriety and begun calling his first Major League Baseball games in over a decade, along with his new announcing partner Gabby. The future seemed fairly bright, even if Jim's relationship with Jules had all but fallen completely apart.

Season 4 does not go where you think it might. Instead of picking up with Jim (Hank Azaria) and Gabby calling Oakland Athletics games for the next season, we start with Jim being surprised by an 8-year-old daughter, Beth, showing up on his doorstep - a daughter he never knew he'd had by a romantic partner in the Phillipines, but who had died tragically in a massive hurricane. We then jump a full decade into the future, where the U.S. has become a near-dystopian land rife with no end of social ills. Major League Baseball still exists, but it is barely hanging onto to its small and ever-dwindling audience. Jim still broadcasts games, but his life is far more dedicated to Beth (Reina Hardesty), who is about to head off to college. In a desperation move, MLB elects Jim as baseball commissioner, hoping that his flare for the spectacular can somehow save the game from death. The succeeding seven episodes span the roughly four years between 2030 and 2034, as Jim deals with Beth going through college, the return of Jules (Amanda Peete) and Charles into his life, and his attempts to save the game he still loves.

This was such an odd turn for this show to take, and it mostly didn't work out very well. I fully respect the writers going way out on a limb to try and do something different and unexpected, but this just felt like an idea that should have been scrapped during the brainstorming session for this season. It wasn't terrible, and it had its share of laughs, but it was by far the weakest of the four seasons, which isn't how any show wants to go out.

Jules, Jim, and Charles at the corporate office of Limon. This
was a plot element that had several really good laughs, but
the theme gobbled up an amount of time that one would
expect more from a science-fiction show, not a comedy with
sports as its backdrop.

Setting aside the fact that the show completely jettisoned the story set up at the end of season 3 - Jim working with Gabby - I think the main problem is that the season never really seemed to know exactly what to do with itself. Making Jim and instant dad had potential, but that story often got washed out among the others: Jim's rekindled relationship with Jules. The return of his sex-addicted ex-wife back into his life. His trying to save all of MLB. And overarching all of this was a sometimes-funny but often just weirdly scary science-fiction/social satire which involved references to failed states. As if all that weren't more than enough for a season of eight 25-minute episodes, there's a story about a nearly-omnipotent computer gadget, the Limon, which plays a rather large role by season's end. All of a sudden, a show which always focused on two or three characters and one or two straightforward story elements gets strangely overstuffed in its swan song season. You just never knew what was coming; and while this can sometimes enhance a story, it only muddied the waters here.

This isn't to say that the show wasn't funny. It was. My wife and I had more than a few good laughs along the way, especially with many of the jokes surrounding the Limon tool. But the gags just weren't as numerous or consistently funny as past seasons, and the ever-shifting tone just made the lack of solid gags stand out all the more.

The finale of this series wasn't so bad that I would dissuade someone from watching it, or being a reason to never start watching the show in the first place. It's not a Game of Thrones scenario, in that respect. I would still recommend this show to people with dark senses of humor, as I feel that the first three seasons are well worth the time. I would just warn people to temper their expectations heading into this fourth and final season. To be ready for a weird, wild ride that may not always be as much fun as the first three seasons.