Image via Netflix By Jessica Toomer Published Jul 16, 2026, 3:01 AM EDT Jessica is a journalist, editor, TCA critic, and multimedia storyteller with a decade of experience covering pop culture, film, TV, women's sports, lifestyle, and more. She earned her degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington with a focus in creative writing before moving to N.Y.C. and getting her start at The Huffington Post . (She still misses those nap pods.) She's covered multiple film festivals, recapped some of your favorite series, worked too many red carpets to count, and even yapped on a podcast or two. When she’s not interviewing your favorite showrunner or ranking Ryan Gosling's best roles for places like UPROXX, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, The Daily Beast, and Cosmopolitan , she’s busy being a full-time hype woman to her cat, Finn. You can find her on Bluesky and, sadly, Twitter . Sign in to your Collider account Add Us On follow Follow followed Followed Like Like Thread Log in Here is a fact-based summary of the story contents: Try something different: Show me the facts Explain it like I’m 5 Give me a lighthearted recap Some people only care about golf when someone in expensive plaid pants is losing his mind over a three-foot putt. That's the whole appeal of the sport, really: rich men in tiny white gloves coming undone on a perfect green, one missed shot away from a full tantrum. The Hawk , Will Ferrell 's first television comedy for Netflix , is built almost entirely around that kind of meltdown — and that alone is enough of a winning premise before Lonnie Hawkins ever tees off.
A bit of background on Ferrell’s latest meme-able disaster : Lonnie "The Hawk" Hawkins was the number one player in the world in 2004, a three-time major winner whose reputation has slid from legend to punchline. His body is telling him to retire. His heart insists he's one stroke away from the greatest comeback golf has ever seen. One more major would complete his career Grand Slam, and Lonnie treats that long shot as something he's owed by the universe. The series is created and executive produced by Ferrell alongside his Gloria Sanchez partners Jessica Elbaum and Alix Taylor , plus Rian Johnson and Ram Bergman 's T-Street and a bench of others, with the PGA TOUR signed on as a partner. How a real sports organization agreed to attach its name to this guy is its own small mystery, but the result is Ferrell's meanest creation yet , planted in a wildly uneven sports comedy that, thanks to its sharpest stretches, is still well worth the swing .
The Hawk introduces Ferrell's Lonnie mid-catastrophe, barreling toward a PGA stop in an absurdly oversized tour bus in a race against the clock that plays like cinema’s least dignified action scene. Within minutes, he's cooing at a golf ball like some kind of phone sex operator and guzzling what is very obviously not water from a sports bottle. He maxes out his ex-wife's credit cards and then won't sign the divorce papers. He's openly, pettily jealous of his own son. By the time the opening credits roll, the picture of him is clear: This is a man who cares about winning and, as far as we can tell, nothing else.
That single-mindedness is also the show's way into golf itself, a sport it clearly finds both fascinating and ridiculous. The world Lonnie moves through is all corporate sponsorships, country-club snobbery, and grown men treating a bad round like a world-ending tragedy, and The Hawk is happy to let him…