Saturday, April 27, 2019

What I’m Watching: Brockmire


Brockmire: Season 3, Episode 3 “The Yips” (B+)

Not knowing much about sports, I didn’t have any context for the yips other than to imagine that the documentary shown at the start of the episode was considerably exaggerated for comedic purposes. Of course Brockmire would be eager to share embarrassing stories unrelated to that condition about the man in question, and I like that the producers designed to stop interviewing him as soon as he started talking because they realized where it was going. In the present, Brockmire of course was eager to find a way to skip through this process just like he does with everything, and that didn’t work out terribly well. Shirley is definitely the right person to be his sponsor, ready to roll her eyes at whatever he says but also to internalize it and try to get him to understand the supreme error of his every idea. Brockmire did take shockingly little time to humiliate Gabby when he accompanied her to church, and he got a somewhat unexpected answer when he prayed to God in the form of taking care of both Matt the Bat and Gabby. I am glad that J.K. Simmons got to make use of his talents in this episode by demanding that Brockmire continue to insult him while he was throwing up, and that experiencing that compelled Brockmire to find a way to keep Gabby there with him by pretending to work through his yips so that she wouldn’t be sacrificed in his pursuit of his prized solo booth.

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