Season Review: Hoops Season One

Overview (Spoilers Below):

Coach Ben Hopkins is a giant personality that’s stuck inside of a tiny man with a humble life. Hopkins has dreams of taking a basketball team to the big leagues and proving his worth as not only a leader, but also an inspirational figure of change. The only problem with Hopkins’ goals is that his constant poor attitude and regressive behavior repeatedly knocks him down until he’s a broken mess of a man. Hopkins may not want to acknowledge how much his stock has fallen, but he is on a precarious path where the only saving grace for him is basketball. Now, with a shattered life and few prospects, Hopkins clings onto his low-tier Kentucky high school basketball team and is determined to prove to the world that the buzzer hasn’t rung for him just yet.

Our Take:

Animation’s relationship with the sports genre is a curious one. There are a plentiful number of TV shows that get into the wonder, majesty, and community of sports, but there are lesser sports comedy television shows and even fewer animated sports comedies (there’s really just Ballmastrz: 9009, which is just riffing on anime’s take on the genre). In this sense it’s actually exciting to see an American animated series like Hoops come forward and try to carve out a new niche. It’s just unfortunate that despite the potential that’s witnessed in Hoops, it’s a very messy show. Hoops is silly and easy television, but this underdog has rabies and it wouldn’t be the worst idea to take it behind the shed and put it out of its misery. But then again, balls are funny!

Created by Ben Hoffman and executive produced by Phil Lord and Chris Miller, Hoops chronicles Coach Ben Hopkins, a washed up high school basketball coach with delusions of grandeur who’s stuck holding up the smallest team in the league in small-town Kentucky. Hoops explores a typical redemptive story, but in this case Hopkins is his own worst enemy and his biggest obstacle towards finding peace. Jake Johnson may not be the most natural fit for this kind of role, but it’s not an awkward performance either and he slowly gets more comfortable in the big personality of the character.

Hoops is an animated series that’s meant for adults and it makes that abundantly clear right from the start. In the show’s sixty-second cold open, the loud, opinionated Coach Ben Hopkins (Jake Johnson) lets out half as many F-bombs. Hoops is almost trying too hard to show how foulmouthed the show’s central character is and it falls a little flat as the introduction to the series’ protagonist.

It’s as if the novelty of the bad language is enough of a joke or character trait, whereas that’s the kind of “humor” that South Park was playing into in its first season over two decades ago. There’s actually some brutal cruelty towards animals (albeit dead ones) that’s legitimately deeply upsetting. It literally beats a dead horse with this obscene and graphic violence, which turns into an entire plot point of an episode.

Hopkins is such a bitter and nihilistic protagonist that it’s hard to not draw comparisons to other mature animated Netflix protagonists like BoJack Horseman or F is for Family’s Frank Murphy, yet Coach Ben Hopkins feels the thinnest of the lot. He’s like a more offensive Peter Griffin that’s in love with basketball. It’s fascinating to see that the show’s theme song consists of Hopkins running off all the things that annoy him in life. It’s more a list of complaints than it is a theme song, but it reiterates that Coach Hopkins is defined by his anger and sour attitude more than anything else.

The only thing that gives Hopkins any joy in life is basketball, which makes it an incredibly important lifeline for the character. However, this love and reverence towards the game is sometimes buried too far beneath Hopkins’ hatred and it’s not enough to make him a redeeming character. Oh, he also has a pill addiction, an ex-wife that he’s not over, and major daddy issues as he struggles to find worth outside of his father’s shadow, so at least he hits all the major bases of a cliché male protagonist. These last two issues also mix together in a drastic way that would make Freud blush.

I’m very much a fan of broken protagonists and characters that really push the limits of what’s likable. Some of the most acclaimed animated shows that are currently on television lean into this growing trend. Despite being in support of this, Coach Hopkins doesn’t really bring enough to the table to justify his attitude. Other shows that test boundaries with how far their protagonists can go always have some way for them to balance the scales back in their favor. Hopkins’ good deeds aren’t enough here and if anything, he’s still a bad influence on these children, with a strong mentor in sports hardly being that important for them in the end. Hopkins is told in the very first episode that he “can’t be an asshole and a losing coach,” and since being an asshole is fundamental to who he is then he better start winning some games.

Episodes of Hoops looks at Coach Hopkins attempts to deal with small stakes situations that mean a lot to him. Standard plots involve getting a ringer to join the team or improve players’ GPA as Hopkins consistently uses sex and inappropriate means to motivate his team and achieve his goals. Episodes broach topics like ethics and morality, but the points that they make are slightly undercut by Hopkins’ attitude in every episode of the series. He tones down some of his more undesirable traits as it’s relevant to the episodic obstacles at hand. Hoops is at its best when it allows itself to get weirder and embraces fringe areas of basketball, like mascot rights.

Coach Hopkins is Hoops’ focal point, but the series tries to flesh out the students that he looks after. There are touches of how Hopkins attempts to get involved in the lives of his team and how their problems can become his missions. Hopkins helps give these misfits a sense of purpose and family when they feel useless elsewhere in the world. It’s a sweet quality to the series, but also very par for the course when it comes to this genre. The issue here is that Matty is really the only student that pops and gets much of a character arc over these ten episodes.

Hoops keeps it light with its storytelling and uses an episodic approach as opposed to more focused and serialized narratives. That’s not to say that a serialized arc where there’s a tournament that the team has been building towards all season or reoccurring stats that are brought up all year are necessary ingredients to make this show work. Obviously it just wants to be a simple comedy. However, this kind of progression is typical for the sports genre and even if it was inconsequential in each episode it’d still help give the season a larger sense of purpose and some appreciated connectivity when so much of Coach Hopkins’ nonsense gets forgotten nearly as quickly as it happens.

Hoops is animated by Bento Box Entertainment and the animation style is nice enough and has the same look as some of the other shows that the animation company has worked on like Brickleberry and Paradise PD. The show’s aesthetic isn’t unpleasant or lazy per se, but it’s not very memorable either. It doesn’t help the series stand out at all, which is sometimes the most important thing when there are so many new animated series vying for the audience’s attention. There’s one drug-induced sequence that inverts the show’s color palette like it’s an episode of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and it’s a brief glimpse of surprising creativity in the series. I honestly wish that the series just kept this look permanently with no explanation behind it. It’d help give this very normal series a strange and unique aesthetic. It’s been a while since a show like The Simpsons randomly changed people’s skin colors for artistic effect.

Hoops doesn’t strive for anything that hasn’t been done before. It’s satisfied with just being crass and silly. With so many adult animated series pushing boundaries and working extra hard to do something different with the medium, Hoops feels entertaining enough, but not essential. It sinks some laughs, but the stakes are low and the protagonist is vile. That being said, Hoops is easy to relax to and have some fun with, plus it’s nice to see a sports animated series be given a chance. Hoops is loud, crude, and unapologetic, which is either going to be a slam dunk for some people, or they’ll want to bench the program and find something with more full court appeal.

Or you can really just let go and enjoy Hoops by having a drink whenever the show mentions the cult Jodie Foster film, Little Man Tate. You’ll be hammered by the time the credits roll for each episode.