Will Ferrell turns Hawk On Netflix with a washed-up golfer role into Lonnie Hawkins, a once famous player now chasing the US Open against his son Lance and longtime rival Golden Fisk. The show gives that premise five hours to breathe, which is exactly why the review says the comedy lands like an artifact from another era rather than a sharpened television idea.
’s review opens with a blunt verdict: "Ferrell’s brash ladies man and loser golfer could have been hilarious. But comedy has sped up over the last two decades, and all the genital gags and dodgy references fall flat". It also describes the series this way: "The Hawk revolves around Lonnie Hawkins, a once famous golfer on a long losing streak."
Lonnie Hawkins and the US Open
Lonnie Hawkins is not framed as a comeback story in the clean, sports-movie sense. He is a 59-year-old golfer whose return to the US Open puts him in direct competition with Lance and Golden Fisk, with Luke Wilson playing the rival and Molly Shannon playing Stacy, Hawkins’s estranged wife. That setup gives the series its basic engine: a washed-up lead, a family split, and a rival who can keep the contest moving while the jokes do the rest.
In the show, that contest is built to run across five hours of television, so the material has to carry more weight than a one-night sketch. In practical terms, that means the series is asking viewers to sit with repeated versions of the same comic mode, from broad golf behavior to the sort of references that worked better in the 2000s than they do now. The review places the show beside Will Ferrell’s Netflix golf comedy without pretending the format has been modernized for streaming.
2000s jokes on repeat
The review points back to the 2000s, when American comedy included Austin Powers, American Pie and Dude, Where’s My Car?, and then to the middle of the decade, when the Frat Pack made Zoolander, Dodgeball and Anchorman. That is the cultural shelf The Hawk reaches for, and it explains why the show leans so hard on nostalgia, sexual jokes and dated references instead of a cleaner, more current comic rhythm.
In 2006, Chamillionaire released Ridin’, and the review says the song gets a spin here; Sisqó’s Thong Song also soundtracks Hawkins cavorting on the golf course in red underwear. The show even has Hawkins stealing a watch from the corpse of a close friend in episode one. Those choices are not subtle, but they do define the series: this is broad comedy built from provocation, throwback cues and a willingness to keep pushing after the bit should probably have stopped.
Molly Shannon as Stacy
Molly Shannon appears as Stacy, Hawkins’s estranged wife, and that casting gives the show one of its sharper comic pairings because she is Ferrell’s 1990s SNL castmate. The review suggests the material could have worked as a comfort watch, but its own line about the jokes falling flat is the more useful guide for viewers deciding whether to spend five hours on it.
My read is simple: The Hawk On Netflix is less a reinvention than a stress test for a style Ferrell has never really left behind. If you want the broadest version of his comedy, the series offers plenty of it; if you want timing that matches the present tense of TV, the review says this one keeps reaching backward.
