Earlier this year, Bojack Horseman (2014) ended in January. Speaking about Bojack Horseman, the storyline, voice-acting and animation raised the bar for every upcoming Netflix original and to be honest for animated shows even outside the Netflix streaming service were really challenged by the amazing series.
Hoops is Netflix’s yet another go at animated series. With considerable hits like Bojack Horseman, Midnight Gospel and Disenchantment. There were a lot of hopes with it from my side considering Netflix never actually happened to make a seriously dismaying series.
Let’s begin with the pilot. It was just horrific. I get it when people try to use adult jokes or profanity as a thing for humour in animation as it gives an edge compared to regular comedy but when a whole series just rely on 18+ obnoxious, distasteful, nasty and overused dirty words to compensate for lack of impact, boring, malicuous and emotionless script is when things are literally begging to go downhill.
The series is about Ben Hopkins. A problematic drunk person who’s a high school basket ball coach who trains a bunch of spoil kids and will do anything to gain fame and prove his egoistic father wrong…including making a 16 year old have intercourse with a hooker in order to get him on his team just to keep his job.
The most baffling thing about this series is that how the creators actually try to milk the comedy out of this sickening person and over the course of series they try to even make us sympathise with him.
Here’s the problem with social values only which I guess aren’t important on a big scale for animated series due to subjectiveness and people considering this “dark humour.”
Although, even talking about it on an objective scale, The series pretty much lacked everywhere including, script, voice-acting etc apart from animation which can be taken as an only positive thing to come out of it.
Talking about script and characters, there’s no emotion and no effort or the strength of dialogues, can be said, is very weak. The characters don’t even change a little bit throughout the series. All of this leads to a massive failure and a boring watch only suitable for people who have got a lot of free time on their hands.
Further thinking, it seems like a mixed version of Rick and Morty, Futurama, Family Guy, South Park and a dozen others so it doesn’t even seem to have a unique factor to it, all of the stuff combines up to make a horror in the label of a sitcom.
In short, this series is a massive disaster and even the cast like Jack Johnson couldn’t save it from becoming a total disappointment, I seriously hope people will start realising that profanity can not be used as a substitute for humour and that stereotyping characters, sexualising kids, spreading fat-phobia and a dozen others toxic and incredibly problematic things don’t make it up for a sitcom.
Ratings: 5.2/10
