Critic Reviews

It’s easy to dismiss Hoops as just curse-filled and crass. But the cast is great, and you start to root for Coach Hopkins and his team by the end of the first episode. It isn’t always funny, but it’s just funny enough and has enough heart to be a decent show.

By the tenth episode there's enough going right here to make one hopeful for future seasons, but it still feels like a disappointment given the pedigree. At the very least, Hoops passes the time until somebody just gives Ron Funches a show of his own.

Ben’s self-indulgent and cynical without warmth or thoughtfulness. The rest of the main cast do their best—and their best Kentucky accents—but the series lacks a vision of where it wants its characters to go or the message it sends, a quality that’s set shows like BoJack Horseman and Big Mouth apart from other animated offerings. To mix sport metaphors, Hoops is like a racehorse with blinders on.

Hoops is a show about an immature man and his immature teenage charges that doesn’t aspire to anything more than making immature jokes and then, often, repeating those same immature jokes. ... There is some funny buried in Hoops, if you can get past the more off-putting moments to find it. But that’s hard to do.

[“Hoops” doesn’t] seem to have much interest in evolving its characters beyond their most basic loglines. That wouldn’t be as much of an issue for a foulmouthed animated comedy if it weren’t for the fact that this foulmouthed animated comedy isn’t half the joke machine it would need to be in order to justify its total lack of nuance.

Hoffman is happy creating a world where Ben can get away with stuff like this without learning his lesson or offering any applicable commentary. There’s no satire here, or anything beyond the surface-level ugliness. That’s not to say there aren’t other characters, but none are fleshed out enough to stand out. ... The profane repetition is only numbing. Hitting the horse harder doesn’t make you laugh at the abuser. It just makes you feel sorry for the horse.

“Hoops” is animated because no network would greenlight a show about an asshole like Ben Hopkins if it were live-action. That may be just barely enough for the most loyal Jake Johnson fans. Everyone else should find another game, cartoon, or literally anything else to watch.

It is filled with hateful stereotypes.

“Hoops” proves that excessive cussing is just like canned laughter when it comes to comedy, in that abuse of either shows the extent of a show's desperation. Ben's profane outrage becomes tiresome pretty quickly.