Season One chronicled the return of the titular honey-voiced play-by-play man from decades of debauched international exile following an on-air meltdown about his wife’s adultery.
Starting over at rock bottom for a barely-viable indie league team, Brockmire rediscovered his love of baseball while making a new friend in Tyrel Jackson Williams’ anxious Charles and a new romantic interest in Amanda Peet’s similarly self-destructive Jules. Season Two saw Brockmire achieve a modest new level of success and fame, only to drive away Charles and everyone else who cared about him with his rampaging drug and alcohol abuse. Fearing death and/or utter loneliness, Brockmire checked into rehab and made a real go of it.
We return one year into his sobriety, at the start of spring training for Jim’s new job back in the big leagues. He is going to 12-step meetings, where his shares often come across as bragging to new sponsor Shirley. He acquires a giant pet turtle, which he names Clemenza, reconnects with his sister Jean and tries to be a better partner and friend to Gabby than he has been to anyone who previously had the misfortune to work alongside him.
As Brockmire creator Joel Church-Cooper told me last year, the show has “a complicated relationship with Major League Baseball.” MLB itself is explicitly mentioned, but Brockmire’s new team is only referred to as “Oakland,” and none of the logos or uniforms resemble that of the real-life Oakland A’s, which gives the show license to call this fictional team cheap without being yelled at by the real A’s ownership.
But as Gabby points out, sobriety itself only takes Brockmire so far. He still prefers 16 words when two will do, like his description of the legendary male anatomy of an ex-ballplayer known as Matt the Bat, “There’s a density to it, Gabby. It’s like a windsock that’s been packed with wet sand.” He still has no proper sense of social boundaries, still elevates his own pain over that of others, still acts as the final arbiter on all things baseball and sex.
He is still a very hard man to love, even as a small army of new supporting characters can’t resist trying.
Season Two was a necessary but dark part of Brockmire’s journey. Not surprisingly, it offered laughs much less frequently than the series’ first year. With Jim in a healthier place, albeit still a precarious one, the ratio of cartoon lunacy to pathos is back in wondrous balance. Church-Cooper and company find remarkable comedy in Jim experiencing familiar activities sober for the first time. But they also dig even deeper into the fundamental brokenness that led Brockmire to blow up his life so often in the past, and into the ways his new support system forces him to look beyond himself. Gabby is primarily the straight man to Brockmire’s antics in the booth, but there’s something instantly endearing in the way each partner tries to support the other. And as Matt the Bat undergoes cancer treatment in the back half of the season, there’s a collection of scenes pairing Azaria with the great Simmons that are utterly poetic in how they capture two men of advancing age considering the time they have left.
It’s amazing that Brockmire can go to such a sad, lovely, introspective place amid all the crude jokes about sex, booze and inside-actual-baseball references. As Brockmire struggles to regain relevance in a modern, anxiety-inducing world, the season even makes an elegant argument for the value of this old and slow sport in the age of smartphones and Peak TV. Both Brockmire the man and Brockmire the show are at their absolute best by the end of this season. We don’t deserve either of them.
Season Three premiered on Wednesday on IFC. I’ve seen all eight episodes.
‘Brockmire’ is an American comedy television series that premiered on April 5, 2017 on IFC. The show stars Hank Azaria, Amanda Peet and Tyrel Jackson Williams. Hank Azaria plays a baseball play-by-play announcer. On March 29, 2018, it was announced that IFC had renewed the series for a third and fourth season.