“Hoops” is about Ben Hopkins (voiced by Jake Johnson), a coarse, vulgar high school basketball coach in small-town Kentucky who has a dream of being like the real-life, actually abusive coach Bobby Knight. In a richer comedy of such caustic proportions, that bleak dream might mean a larger investigation. But “Hoops” is not concerned with a study of such white rage so much as harvesting it for alternately outrageous and sleepy shenanigans, driven by someone who swears like 10-year-olds do when they discover such words. Alas, Ben is a certifiable adult, and he shouldn’t be coaching high schoolers, as much as he thinks it will lead him to his ultimate goal—coaching the Chicago Bulls and getting an infinity pool.
Created by Ben Hoffman, “Hoops” proves that excessive cussing is just like canned laughter when it comes to comedy, in that abuse of either proves the extent of a show’s desperation. Ben’s profane outrage becomes tiresome pretty quickly into the pilot episode, and doesn’t make for much of a study for the following nine episodes that are based around Johnson’s angry character. The show just brandishes its dysfunction, like his relationship with his soon-to-be-ex-wife Shannon (Natasha Leggero), his friend Ron (Ron Funches) who is now dating Shannon, or his hotshot father (Rob Riggle), who owns a steakhouse. The closest “Hoops” goes to getting underneath Ben’s hard exterior is during plotlines about fathers and sons, but the show doesn’t have the capacity for it. It’s just another idea to show why Ben is so messed up, and essentially helpless.
The world of “Hoops” is filled with lazy characters, like a parody on a sports movie that forgets to follow through on the clever joke. Ben coaches a group of underdogs, which includes stereotypes like the fat kid, the nerd, and the redneck, and a token Black character. The easy, character-based jokes that you expect from this line-up do indeed arrive, and the one standout is Matty, a seven-foot-tall kid that Ben thinks will be his key to coaching success. When the show focuses more on them as a ragtag group—trashing the school, or trying to hang with cheerleaders during a weekend trip—it leads to more empty jokes. Especially when Ben is involved, the show is simply so inappropriate that its R-rated jokes are hardly shocking. That’s the constant experience of “Hoops,” which thinks that its generic characters and crude jokes are clever enough.