You might think it would be impossible for a television show featuring Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, Jimmy Tatro, Fortune Feimster, Chris Parnell and David Hornsby not to generate at least a few laughs.

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Netflix‘s The Hawk, a new 10-episode comedy, proves you correct.

The Hawk, created by Harper Steele, Chris Henchy and Ferrell, does generate a few laughs. But it probably establishes a new baseline representing the absolute minimum number of laughs it would be possible for a television show featuring Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, Jimmy Tatro, Fortune Feimster, Chris Parnell and David Hornsby to generate.

In general, The Hawk is a show that consistently operates at a barely minimal level, starting with the credits song, a slice of ’80s anthemic rock that contains the lyrics, “They call him the Hawk/ He’s a golfer/ The greatest golfer in the world.” Wait. Sorry. The song doesn’t contain those lyrics — those are the only lyrics. It’s a piece of cheeky minimalism and a promise delivered.

If Apple TV’s imperfect but far superior Stick felt like an easily digestible Franken-comedy stitched together from Happy Gilmore and Tin Cup, The Hawk feels like a set of placeholder notecards, a vague outline of a series unencumbered by any fleshed-out ideas or characterizations. There will be countless worse shows this year, but it’s doubtful that 2026 will offer a show as hollow and forgettable as The Hawk.

Ferrell plays Lonnie “The Hawk” Hawkins, who was indeed the greatest golfer in the world at some point in the ’00s or ’10s (The Hawk is vague on time). Lonnie was popular and dominant, one putt away from winning the U.S. Open and completing a career grand slam, with all four of golf’s major titles.

For reasons that are, at best, hazy, Lonnie had a meltdown of some amorphous type that had some sort of non-specific impact on his overall psyche, leaving him stuck in a nebulous rut.

Lonnie has spent the past decade on the Korn-Ferry Tour, the feeder tour for the PGA, which produced The Hawk through its PGA Tour Studios banner. Apparently, Lonnie hasn’t made a cut in seven years, a remarkable level of futility especially given that the show can’t even commit to suggesting that Lonnie’s game is spectacularly bad. If The Hawk is to be trusted, Lonnie is exactly bad enough to never make a cut and exactly good enough that he isn’t a total laughingstock. He, like the show around him, is merely there — sub-adequate in an unremarkable way.

Nearly everybody in Lonnie’s life has abandoned him, including wife Stacy (Shannon), who has taken to following their son (Tatro’s Lance), a rising star on the real tour. Stacy is hawking, so to speak, a new canned cocktail called Teed Off, and she’s accompanied by Radford (Hornsby), who appears in every scene reading a piece of classic gay-themed literature just so you get that he’s gay. Lance has an aspiring influencer fiancée (Katelyn Tarver), about whom it would be pointless to say anything.

But back to Lonnie. He’s traveling in a huge tour bus paid for by earlier winnings, accompanied only by his friend, driver and longtime caddy Old Henry (Keith David), who dies within the first 15 minutes of the show. This allows Lonnie to do several things that are callous and make him very difficult to like, and also to hire a new caddie (Feimster’s Sam), who knows nothing about golf and has a mysterious past that comes into play briefly and semi-pointlessly.

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Anyway, Lonnie dreams of returning to the PGA Tour, either to somehow win the U.S. Open and finally complete that career grand slam or to reconnect with his son and rekindle flames with his wife, but his actual motivations don’t matter. Just prepare to be shocked when the season builds to a climactic tournament face-off between Lonnie, Lance and Golden Fisk (Luke Wilson), Lonnie’s longtime golfing rival and a shameless composite of Timothy Olyphant from Stick, Don Johnson from Tin Cup and Christopher McDonald from Happy Gilmore.

Ferrell’s love of sports is well-established and, like SNL compatriot Adam Sandler and Tin Cup star Kevin Costner, he has gradually worked his way down a checklist of fictional athletic endeavors with results that range from beloved (Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby) to interesting (Semi-Pro) to forgettably silly (Blades of Glory) to forgettably awful (Kicking & Screaming). Feel free to use any disagreements on those Ferrell sports movies as a sign of whether you’re likely to disagree with me on The Hawk as well.

This is easily the most shapeless and least comedically focused of Ferrell’s sports stories. It’s unclear how much of that relates to the participation of PGA Tour Studios, which allows the show to utilize the name of real tour events, real tour sponsors and several players — though if you don’t know who Rickie Fowler or Justin Thomas are, you won’t recognize them here, and if you do recognize them, their presence adds very little. Having the use of real PGA Tour sponsors opens the door for The Hawk to become a running litany of product placement and off-hand product mentions, which was the case in Talladega Nights as well, only to far funnier effect. Here, characters spend a lot of time at Buffalo Wild Wings, make occasional stops at McDonalds and express their love for various brand-name chocolate bars, and that, in and of itself, is the joke.

There’s no evidence that the PGA Tour made it a requirement that The Hawk only showcase the tour in the most positive light. There are various sequences that treat the tour, its board and its players as objects of general ridicule, but nothing cuts close enough to the bone to indicate a satirical bite. Instead, the treatment of the PGA and of TGL, the PGA’s partner simulated indoor golf league, boils down to “amusing but cool,” the least comically meaningful perspective imaginable. The edgiest the show gets is several references to the rival LIV Tour as the “Arab Tour,” which is more a joke about xenophobic responses to the Saudi-funded LIV Tour than the tour itself. There’s just no angle to any of it, no approach that says “Here’s why we want to make a show set in this world,” other than that golf is a sport with goofy outfits that affords the opportunity to giggle and say “balls” and “holes” a lot.

And there’s no angle to any of the characters, no approach that says “Here’s why these people are funny.” Lonnie is a Ferrell-ian blend of narcissism and good-natured childishness, but of the wishy-washiest type. He’s sometimes a bad father and a bad friend, but never so bad or for so long that it challenges the viewer. Ferrell, Henchy and David Gordon Green all previously worked on Eastbound & Down, a sports comeback series with enough superficial similarities to underline how toothless The Hawk and especially its characters are.

Ferrell’s loose-limbed physicality is always good for some chuckles, and that’s the case here as well. The same is true of Shannon’s gift for eviscerating quips and Feimster’s talent for proudly shouting inappropriate things, both on full display. But other than frequently threatening to cut the dicks off of various characters in various ways, nothing about Stacy is funny as a character, while the reveal of Sam’s secret is hugely underwhelming.

Tatro is, as ever, a master of air-headed himbo timing, but we’re constantly being told and briefly shown things about the character that never escalate or pay off. Characters come and go and you keep thinking, “Surely THIS person will be meaningful?” or “Surely THIS person isn’t just going to vanish without a single subsequent mention?” and you’d be wrong. Even if it’s never unpleasant to have as many funny people present as possible, it’s unpleasant how little use The Hawk gets out of Hornsby and Parnell and Wilson, as well as reliable guest stars like David, Mae Martin, Patty Guggenheim and Toby Huss.

It’s one thing to do a loose comedy that gives the impression of being largely improvised, but shows like Eastbound & Down or Curb Your Enthusiasm or The League were never sloppy and haphazard in this way.

Before this incarnation of The Hawk, Netflix ordered a golf comedy from Ferrell, Ramy Youssef and Josh Rabinowitz with the title Golf — more cheeky minimalism — but Youssef and Rabinowitz left the process so early that they don’t even have a credit here anymore. We’ll never know what that show would have been, but I’m confident that any show from the co-creator of Ramy and #1 Happy Family USA would at least have had a hook.

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Flat and disposable throughout, The Hawk does not.