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. 

Idiot Boxing: Brockmire, season 1 (2017); Archer, season 8 (2017)

Brockmire, season 1 (2017)

I wasn't completely sure that the concept behind this show would carry an entire season, but it fortunately proved me wrong. Credit to Hank Azaria and the writers for taking a funny little short sketch and expanding into a larger world and narrative that maintains it humor well beyond its humble origins on Funny or Die.

Brockmire follows the titular baseball announcer attempting a comeback after an all-time great fall from fame. The show opens with this very fall: it's 2007 and Kent Brockmire is doing play-by-play for the Kansas City Royals, where he has done the job for many years. As usual, he is imbibing alcohol during his broadcast, but unlike previous ones, this time Brockmire confesses to the entire listening audience that he had just earlier that day walked in on his wife having an orgy. This triggers a full-blown, on-the-air, profanity-laden meltdown that leads to Brockmire's dismissal and eventual departure from the United States altogether. Flash forward to 2017. Brockmire arrives in a fictionalized version of Morristown, Pennsylvania, where he has been offered a gig as the public address announcer for the Morristown Frackers, a bottom of the barrel minor league team in an impoverished, burned out town of no consequence. Although he wants to try to work his way back to the big leagues, Brockmire still carries with him virtually every vice known to mankind.

The show is a great vehicle for "man of a million voices" Hank Azaria, probably best known for his over-a-dozen characters on the Simpsons (including Moe, Apu, Chief Wiggum, and tons of others), delivers that classic, smooth-as-silk and overly polished pipes of the classic baseball broadcasters in the vein of Vin Scully. Hearing that American-as-apple-pie voice delivering some of the degenerate and self-reviling existential musings of a broken man is just as funny as you think it might be. There are a few moments when the show almost veers too far into depression to make a successful turn back, but it always manages to end on humorous notes.

At the end of a long, beer-soaked baseball/drinking game,
Jules, Brockmire, and Charles celebrate a big win.

If Azaria and the Brockmire character were all there was to the show, it would probably wear thin pretty quickly. Fortunately, the supporting cast and characters are almost equally entertaining. Amanda Peet plays Jules James, the owner of the Frackers who is desperate to keep the pathetic team alive as one of the few emotional buoys in the failed town. Jules is nearly as depraved as Brockmire, able to keep up with his immense appetites for booze and sex, making them quite the pair. Then there's Charles, the goofy, nerdy, millennial kid who assists Brockmire in the booth (and who knows and cares little about baseball). The play between the two is often gold.

The structure of the show is solid, as well. Almost every episode is a flashback to a period during Brockmire's dark decade - the 10 year period between 2007 and 2017, when he was off the grid calling oddball sporting events in foreign countries. While also hilarious, these manage to flesh out the character a little more. And rather than just be eight episodes of Brockmire spewing raunchy observations, which would get somewhat tired, there is an actual arc to the season. Human drama is hardly the point of the show, but it does offer a welcome touch of depth.

Final verdict is that the wife and I liked it (and the wife isn't always on board with shows about sports and the disgusting characters who populate the world of sports). Thanks to some sharp writing and all-in performances by the cast, I'm looking forward to the second season, already scheduled for next year.


Archer, season 8 (2017)

The theme of season 8 draws deep from the vast well of
noir tales from the '40s and '50s. 

After playing catchup on this series by binging the first seven seasons over the course of a few months, this was the first season that I watched as it aired. For the most part, I wasn't disappointed.

Being subtitled "Dreamland", season 8 picks up directly after the cliffhanger ending of season 7, and we now have Sterling in a coma. Using the brilliant device from the classic 1980s British crime TV series The Singing Detective, this season takes place almost completely inside Sterling's mind, wherein he plays a version of himself in the Los Angeles of late 1940s noir cinema. Instead of a spy, he is a private detective and World War II veteran who tries to track down the killers of his partner, Woodhouse (who in his real life was his horribly abused butler). The other regular characters of the show are now altered versions of themselves, each now occupying a role typical of the noir films and novels. Cyril is now a stuffy, crooked cop, Lana is an undercover U.S. Treasury agent, Pam (who is, hilariously, a man in Archer's coma dream), and all of the other characters see similar shifts, including Malory as a crime lord known conveniently as "Mother."

The show features all of the lightning-quick zingers and depravity of the previous seven seasons, but there are so many extra layers to be enjoyed for fans of noir fiction. True to the genre, there is an overly complicated plot, made only the more complex by the various characters' bungling and idiocy. A little off-beat spice is added by including Kruger as a former Nazi scientist conducting his typically insane experiments, perhaps as a tip of the cap to the emerging popularity of the science-fiction genre in the late 1940s.

The real-world Pam, known only as Poovey in Archer's
coma dream, is now a male cop. It's one of the better
alternative takes on what is one of my favorite characters
in the show's entire run. 

I will say that this season was perhaps not quite as thoroughly satisfying as some of its predecessors. Part of this is due to the season's brevity - only eight episodes as opposed to the normal 13 or even 10 of seasons one through seven. There are also a few gags and sequences that don't quite hit, which is a little surprising given the smaller number of episodes. The expected trade-off of a shorter season is that the writing will be even tighter than more protracted seasons, but such is not quite the case here.

The only other minor disappointment for me with this season was that it did not end with the typical lead-in to the next season. Given the atypical, fantasy nature of this arc, I was fully expecting to get at least a quick teaser for what season nine might have in store. Alas, it was not to be. I suppose we fans of the show will simply have to wait and guess at what direction the show will take next. Regardless, I'll be ready and eager for it.