A quick review of tonight’s Brockmire coming up just as soon as I’m photographed in a dress while kissing a woman dressed as a man…
The first two episodes of Brockmire understandably focused on the troika of Brockmire, Jules, and Charles, with the players on the team existing mainly to give Brockmire something to do in the booth besides drink and discuss his many sexual escapades in the South Pacific. “Kangaroo Court” tries at times to shed a spotlight on the Frackers themselves, with mixed results, because it has to establish some level of backstory on Yoshida, his translator, the beef with Uribe, and the way Yoshida keeps himself separate from the rest of the team, all while still servicing the stories of the main characters, and it felt at times that large chunks of necessary exposition, if not whole scenes, were missing. A good idea in theory — there’s a lot of comedy to be mined from the many culture clashes of baseball and the game’s arcane traditions, even on this low organized level of the sport — that needed a bit more time, or perhaps to be saved for season two.
But the material with the leads was again both hilarious and tragic, whether the opening flashback where we see a pre-meltdown Brockmire turning his back on his partner after a sex scandal of his own, or Jules figuring out that Gary is trying to destroy the team (a good choice not to draw out that revelation, since it’s bad when the audience gets too far ahead of the characters), or one of my favorite lines of dialogue of the whole series, delivered in Hank Azaria’s wonderful Brockmire voice: “Knowledge and assumptions, those are like Loggins and Messina. They seem similar, but time proves one of them to be completely worthless.”
What did everybody else think? And are you excited or scared to see Lucy show up on Jim’s new home turf?