HBO’s new hit show Ballers, which stars Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as retired NFL player Spencer Strasmore, is a dramedy that is neither compellingly dramatic nor particularly funny. It follows a handful of characters navigating the Miami professional football landscape. Strasmore and his partner, Joe Krutel (Rob Corddry), are newly minted financial advisors at a firm called Anderson Financial and are trying to carve out a formidable clientele for a new Sports Management division. We also have Ricky Jerret (John David Washington, son of Denzel), a volatile receiver for the Dolphins who can’t keep his head on straight, Vernon Littlefield (Donovan W. Carter) a superstar defensive tackle with a problematic posse, and Charles Greane (Omar Miller) a retired offensive lineman who doesn’t know what to do with his life post-football.
Undoubtedly, there is a lot of interesting material in this world that a good show could work with. A good show would seriously tackle issues like post-concussive syndrome or the invasive nature of 24/7 media coverage. Or it would play up the ridiculousness of this world into a satire on masculinity and wealth. Ballers does neither, but thinks it’s doing a little bit of both. And therein lies the problem. Rather than pick a cohesive direction and take creative risks to try and make it work, Ballers is comfortable meandering around in a boring middle ground.
As a drama, it feels empty and false because there are no real stakes. Each character’s problems work themselves out, often in ridiculous and nonsensical ways, so that they’re better off at the end of the season than they were at its beginning. Charles Greane is a disaster in his comeback tryout with the Dolphins but they give him a contract anyways because sure, why not. And then suddenly he’s really good again and now pancaking defensive linemen in camp.
Comically, there are moments of competence. Throughout the season there were nice touches here and there where the show understood that things natural to the world, such as yacht parties and party houses, were already funny. It took them and ran with them. But there were also numerous ridiculous scenes throughout the season, such as Jason the Boring Sports Agent dealing with his mother’s younger boyfriend or 95% of whatever Ricky is doing, where the show aimed for hilarity and came up with tedium.
Ballers has been sold as the football version of Entourage, a fair comparison given that both shows share a creator, Steven Levinson, and have occupied HBO’s 10 pm time-slot. But while Entourage had a plethora of issues itself, it fundamentally understood its appeal much more than Ballers does. What made Entourage a hit wasn’t its star, Vincent Chase. What made it a hit was the supporting cast around him. Nobody really watched Entourage to see what was going to happen to Vince, but rather they wanted to see what Ari was going to say or what Johnny Drama was going to do. Vince drove the main plot, but it was the appeal of hanging out with The Boys each week that made the show a hit.
Conversely, Ballers has arguably the biggest movie star on the planet anchoring its show and yet he’s weirdly underused throughout the first season. Rather, the show falsely gambles on its supporting cast being able to carry weight it doesn’t need to be carrying. In a 30-minute show, there isn’t enough screen time to give all of these characters their own plots each week. And their characters aren’t written deeply enough (or with any depth) to justify the screen time they do get.
The show has a major point-of-view problem in that all these characters should be seen through Strasmore’s eyes. He’s supposed to be their mentor and he spends much of the show driving around putting out the fires they create. He also has inner demons to deal with and potential health problems as well. And that’s what the show should be; Spencer Strasmore as a professional bullshitter, good at solving everyone else’s issues but unable to even face his own.
What we end up with is Strasmore being half developed, Greane being a quarter developed and having his season arc end ridiculously, and everyone else as shallow caricatures. Joe Kurtel is presented as a sympathetic figure because he’s the every day guy with no money and no name value, but we don’t know anything about him. What drives him to keep going? What are his motivations? We see that he’s occasionally good at his job, we see that he likes to party, and that ultimately he’s a nice guy. Great, there needs to be more there for him to be compelling.
Ricky Jerret is supposed to be depicted as misunderstood. He does idiotic things regularly though he’s not that bad of a guy. But there isn’t an ounce of nuance in the way his character is written. His arc hits exactly every lazy beat you’d expect it to, right down to the origin of many of his issues being an absent father.
Seen through Strasmore’s eyes, the lack of character depth in each supporting figure would be more acceptable. Johnson is so good in this show and such a charismatic performer that even having him as a supporting character in some of these scenes would instantly boost their quality. But often times, he’s absent, sometimes for entire chunks of episodes. It’s when these ancillary figures are left to their own demise that the show really falls into self-parody.
This all is not to say Ballers has been a failure. Its ratings are good, presumably because of Johnson, and it has been renewed for a second season. It can obviously get away with being bad, but that doesn’t mean that it should aim to do so. That’s the fear with something like this. There isn’t anything motivating it to improve. It can be the same hardly watchable show for five more years and it will probably rate well enough for HBO to keep it going.
But you watch Ballers and you hope that, at the very least, it gives Johnson more to do in its second season. In answering the question of whether or not Strasmore had post-concussive syndrome with a resounding no – we got two different scenes confirming his test results – the show pulled the rug out from underneath Johnson. Any possibility for him to play something interesting went by the wayside. Watching him in this is like watching a great athlete play a game on cruise control. He’s still the best thing about Ballers, but he can get to another level. The show should heap all of its problems onto him. Nobody’s shoulders are bigger.
