Far from Perfect, Far from Terrible

Don't listen to the negative reviews

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

This movie tries so hard to be funny, yet it falls flat every time. Just another example of recycled ideas repackaged with women in an attempt to appeal to a certain audience.

I have not LAUGHED OUT LOUD at a TV show since SEINFELD. Comedic GENIUS! fresh, witty and HYSTERICAL!It is a BIT adult themed, but absolutely FABULOUS! Some DARK humor, sort of a show that mocks the worst moments of life in the best way ever.If you are having a bad day, a good day doesn't matter, WATCH this show you will be glad you did!ALL types of comedy styles in here...some classic "I love Lucy" silliness that appeals to that sort of humor mind with some classic Bob Newhart humor moments when character deliver hysterically funny lines with deadpan seriousness to some mockery fatalistic dark humor, some perverseness and some to clever witty Seinfeld type humor with an intelligence to it...this is just comedy at its absolute best...I cannot believe I NEVER heard of this series before...May it stay on TV for a LONG time to keep me amused.

The irreverent and bawdy show on IFC tells the tale of a sports announcer fallen from grace after an on-air meltdown mounting his comeback in a small town in Pennsylvania. Jim Brockmire (Hank Azaria) is the famed sports announcer who used to be the voice of baseball in Kansas City until his wife Lucy (Katie Finneran) reveals to him that she has been having all sorts of sexual escapades while he was away. Jim breaks down and loses his career spending years shamefully hiding in foreign countries. He returns to American sports when Jules James (Amanda Peet) hires him to announce for a minor league team and generate some controversy for increased attendance.While drinking heavily since Jules also owns a bar, Brockmire finds comfort being behind the microphone once again for the Morristown Frackers. As the Frackers win after Jules and Brockmire have a one-night stand, the two continue to have superstitious sex so that the team can keep up the streak. Helping promote Brockmire and Fracker online is Charles (Tyrel Jackson Williams) who helps Brockmire's rants go viral. Check out more of this review and others at swilliky.com

I've never really followed baseball in real life, but, for whatever reason, I've always loved baseball comedies with The Bad News Bears being one of my favorite movies of all time, and "Eastbound & Down" being arguably the funniest television series of the past decade. Although "Brockmire" has yet to air an entire season yet, it has already come close to surpassing "Eastbound & Down" in my mind. Like "Eastbound & Down", "Brockmire" features a hard-to-love protagonist with self-destructive tendencies, but it's also smarter and better written. Hank Azaria, who I've never really particularly loved in anything other than Gross Point Blank, is simply amazing Jim Brockmire, a baseball announcer famous for losing his mind on the air upon learning his wife cheated on him. Such a scenario could just be an excuse to go for cheap laughs at every turn, and although "Brockmire" certainly goes for cheap laughs at times, it's also surprisingly moving and even a little philosophical at times. The main question of "Brockmire" is whether peoples' lives are defined by only their worst moments, and what it means to change as a human being in order to have a meaningful legacy. While "Brockmire" never approaches becoming a drama, Azaria's performance carries a fair amount of dramatic weight, as the hurt and sadness of Brockmire are as much a source of conflict as they are for dark humor. Ultimately, "Brockmire" is only partially about baseball, though the baseball scenes tend to be the funniest. The show has proved to be a big hit for IFC, and it will be interesting to see how both the character and the show grow in its second season. For its fantastic first season, I'd give it 9/10 so far. Highly recommended.

"Brockmire," starring Hank Azaria and Amanda Peet, is frankly hilarious. (The highlight of this show are the jokes in the dialogue, so summarizing the plot so far doesn't really amount to the disclosure of too many spoilers.) This has to be the show meant to be created just for Azaria (and primarily by Azaria), although it began as one of a set of Funny Or Die videos. He plays an on-the-precipice-of-irretrievably-washed-up baseball announcer Jim Brockmire, whose acidly cynical prose and foulest of mouths serves up a nonstop flood of hardball commentary and darkly comic social poetry. He hates the world, people, his life and his part in it, and yet he loves baseball because of its potential for purity and poetry, but also for how ridiculous a spectacle it can often be. Brockmire, who had been among the gold standard of announcers in the bigs, gets fired for cause by a team in K.C. after an extended, alcohol-fueled, on-air rant about deviant sex practices involving his ex-wife, later succinctly captured by the term "Lucy-ed." After wandering in overseas venues for 10 years (including a stint calling cockfights in Manila), he alights in Morristown, Pa., an economically dispirited town where the local off-off-off market semipro ball club, the Frackers, must compete with meth, the other low-cost form of recreation in the area. The team are a sorry lot of uniquely untalented, skinny geeks, plus several morbidly obese hackers, and one former big leaguer of actual talent and Latin origin, Uribe (played with swagger by Hemky Madera), who has tons of la Postura. All of the Frackers worship Brockmire for the sake of his middle aged bad boy YouTube profile, of which, as the show begins, Brockmire himself was wholly unaware. While overseas, he missed the whole Internet thing, which eventually involved Drake writing a lyric about him "keeping it Brockmire." Peet plays a smart baseball idealist and owner of a local bar that she inherited from her Dad, who was a Pirates fan. She sold her house and took out a mortgage on the bar to buy the downtrodden, fleabag Frackers. She gradually convinces Brockmire of the insane gonzo quality of him doing play by play commentary over the P.A. system in the stadium, for perhaps the worst pro ballclub in existence, but she has plans to build up the team's public persona. Tyrel Jackson Williams plays a socially awkward tech geek who becomes Brockmire's social media assistant, and he adds the vibe of someone fascinated while watching a car wreck's aftermath. There's a gag in which one shirtless local fans busies himself by stripping and repairing a lawnmower engine in an otherwise vacant section of the stands. The writing in this show is outrageously, caustically, and obscenely funny, and Azaria's glibly sour delivery is damned near perfect. Yes, it's gimmicky. But it's the best kind of gimmicky. As Brockmire's call of an improbable grand slam homer, with three severely obese players jamming the bases (they all got hit in their capacious guts or asses by pitched balls), unwinds over the stadium P.A., "OHhhh, that ball cannot go to Jewish heaven because it got TATTOOED! One THOUSAND pounds of finely cured Italian meat come waddling home, folks, it's a Grand Salami!" The language and sexual innuendo here are not for the prude, it's IFC that's airing this, so that shouldn't be a surprise. One wonders, as others have pointed out here, how far the writing can take this concept. The first season is 8 half-hour episodes, and a second set of 8 has been ordered. The Bad News Bears was outrageously funny, once, in a single perfect film, but the sequel films and the attempted TV show couldn't recapture its magic. It appears, however, that cameos by baseball media figures are on tap for Brockmire, as well as the very funny beer ad that aired with episode 3. In the meantime, batter up, Brockmire's acid wit is at the plate, and the rye (and wry) is being poured.