This tale of a girlboss battling the sporting world’s patriarchy is a real grind. Perhaps it’d be funny if you care deeply about the sport … but shouldn’t a comedy be able to make you laugh regardless?
Are you in the mood for a basketball comedy that has some leaden jokes and some even more leaden things to say about sexism and prejudice in the US industrial sports complex? Of course you’re not. Nobody is. But it’s here, it stars Kate Hudson and it’s called Running Point so let’s deal with it.
Hudson plays Isla Gordon, one of four siblings whose father owned the Los Angeles Waves basketball team. Despite being the only one of Daddy Gordon’s children who is knowledgable about the game, she has been overlooked all her life. Why? Because she is a girl and the rest of them are boys! Cue a cutesy flashback in which a child actor delivers a Sorkinesque monologue about the team’s chances and her recommended player trades while trotting beside her father down a corridor of power, before having the door shut in her face as he enters another meeting room full of men in suits. She describes him, in what passes for a zinger in this sitcom, as an old-school “sexist asshole”. So she rebels in her teens and 20s, with a 20-day marriage and a photoshoot for Playboy.
