Kate Hudson stole the show in 2022’s “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Story,” her last major comedic role. Hudson played a scandal-ridden fashion designer, skewering the shallow costumes a certain kind of rich social justice influencer wears with giddy, screwball aplomb. The role, functioning as a kind of comeback for Hudson, makes one excited for her next comedic leading role in Netflix’s TV series “Running Point,” especially knowing it comes from comedy vets Mindy Kaling, Ike Barinholtz, and David Stassen (who all collaborated on “The Mindy Project”).
But in practice, “Running Point” does not let Hudson discover the specificities and eccentricities so joyfully gleaned in her previous work. The 10-episode first season is a flattening, often maddening watch, only occasionally rising above generic familiarities to deliver something trenchant or specific about its otherwise generically dysfunctional family.
Hudson plays Isla Gordon, the only daughter of a dynastic family centered around the operations of the Los Angeles Waves basketball team, previously owned by a now-deceased, always-bullying father. After the team’s current president, Isla’s brother Cam (Justin Theroux), steps away due to scandal, he surprisingly installs Isla as the new president, ruffling the feathers of other brothers Sandy and Ness (Drew Tarver and Scott MacArthur, respectively). Now thrust into the limelight of an historically male-centric organization, Isla must navigate the business of basketball, the lingering traumas of her family and that pesky work/life balance.
The creaky pilot episode stops every so often to offer freeze frames with hand-written titles and voiceover from Isla explaining every character archetype, plot-setter and even topic of jokes we need to know — for example, Isla voiceover-introduces her chief of staff/best friend Ali Lee (Brenda Song) by saying she swears a lot and Ali’s very next line does, indeed, have a couple swears.
This technique is helpful for immediately orienting a viewer, sure. But beyond the dissatisfaction in having any comedic surprise be negated by a hand-holding voiceover, the show then mostly ignores these setups in favor of one-dimensionality. We’re told that Sandy is a cheapskate who knows nothing of basketball and that Ness is a slob who knows everything about basketball. But when the two brothers act in tandem together, these character definers bear no effect. Sandy sometimes talks about money and Ness sometimes eats fast food, but when they’re both chastising their sister over an issue with the team, it’s as though they’re the same person moving the plot along as bluntly as possible. It’s either the show nullifies the voiceover or the voiceover nullifies the show. Either way, not great.
Whenever “Running Point” does discover some kind of identifiable voice, it moves from “creaky” to “queasy.” In lieu of hard, specific jokes, the aforementioned use of swear words clutters every line, often as a punctuation to a half-shouted insult, finding no vulgar poetry heard in the likes of other high-stakes workplace comedies like “Veep.”
The show also rides the fine line between inclusion and exploitation of specific social and ethnic groups. The divide between rich and poor folks is played with coarse buffoonery, overeager to punch down, deriding the forced practices of less wealthy people with garish glee. Latinx, Jewish and Filipino characters are introduced with immediate, glib stereotypes that feel insistent in their desire to gawk, to assume the viewers share in their reductions (one uncommented on visual joke, where a Filipina character has karaoke on in the background, is particularly egregious).
The fallacy of “equal opportunity offense” requires a willful ignorance of the pretty provable idea that equality doesn’t really exist in our American cultural spaces, popular or otherwise, and that the author and the target of “offensive statements” matters deeply. This show plays dreadfully, willfully ignorant.
And all of this is even before getting into the Chet Hanks of it all! Yes, the much-maligned scion of Tom Hanks plays a lead role on the program, and yes, it plays directly into our collective image of “Chet Hanks” as “a guy who has very publicly said and done racist things in an attempt to be seen as a race-blind rapper.” Hanks plays a much-maligned basketball player who very publicly says and does racist (and sexist!) things in an attempt to be seen as a race-blind rapper. He is, perhaps regrettably, one of the funnier parts of the show; his line-readings are wonderfully, woefully specific in excoriating this particular kind of dumb, rich white guy.
But does this guy deserve to satirize his own scandal-ridden image like this? Is it even satirization if the guy doing it still seems to earnestly be doing the things the show is making fun of? Or is it another train wreck for the show to gawk at, to elbow the viewer and whisper, “Look at this freak”? “Ted Lasso,” another sports comedy in some part about rehabilitating a bad boy athlete, has its warranted criticisms, but the idea of being curious, not judgmental, would’ve done wonders for many facets of “Running Point.”
This show was originally sold to Netflix by Elaine Ko, a writer/producer on “Only Murders in the Building” and “Modern Family,” in 2021. She was to run the show alongside EPs Kaling and real-life Los Angeles Lakers president Jeanie Buss. Somewhere along the production timeline, Ko left the show and Kaling’s familiar collaborators Barinholtz and Stassen joined, with Stassen taking over as showrunner.
While the circumstances behind Ko’s departure are not public, and she does retain co-creator credit, the program nonetheless feels like the result of mitigating losses. From the obviously ADR’d exposition clarifiers to the gritted efficiency at which it burns through both workplace and family sitcom plots without clear, refined jokes, “Running Point” plays damage control defense to a frustrating degree. Isla Gordon may eventually get good at this kind of tracks-before-the-train leadership, but the show surrounding her does not.
“Running Point” premieres Thursday, Feb. 27, on Netflix.