Clarisse Loughrey’s Show of the Week column spotlights a new show to watch or skip. This week: Kate Hudson is the new fish-out-of-water head of a professional basketball team in Running Point.
Terrible rich people are good business these days. Since they already run our lives, we may as well treat their monstrousness as our own personal clown show. Post-Succession and The White Lotus, it was inevitable the abominably rich would come for the sitcom—though not all, it seems, are born equal. Maya Rudolph plays a delectably vain one on Apple TV+’s Loot. And since Kate Hudson played much the same to viperish effect in Rian Johnson’s Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (2022), the prospect of her leading an entire series as the head of a basketball team-owning dynasty seemed an easy sell.
Unfortunately, Netflix’s Running Point falls for the obvious trap: her character, Isla Gordon, is too nice to be fun, too nasty to be likeable. We’re supposed to root for her because she’s the sole daughter between three sons, whose father, owner of the fictional LA Waves, was a classic misogynist who slammed the door shut on her expansive sports expertise. In retaliation, she landed a Playboy cover and a 20-day marriage to Beverly Hills, 90210’s Brian Austin Green. When the Gordon patriarch died, the LA Waves were bequeathed to the eldest and most charismatic son, Cam (Justin Theroux).
And when Cam crashes his car trying to pick up a dropped crack pipe, it’s Isla who’s suddenly thrust into power. She’s the first woman to lead a pro basketball team (while the LA Waves are fictional, the series is executive produced by owner of the LA Lakers, and real-life trailblazer, Jeanie Buss). Women aren’t allowed to make mistakes, of course. So, she immediately walks out onto a layer of thin ice, with her family, players, and the entire media industry primed to watch her fumble.
But you might also come to resent her, too—not for her gender (at least, I would hope not), but because the flaws presented by the show aren’t the real flaws in her character. She’s meant to be a klutz. She’s mean to be such a voracious go-getter that she neglects her handsome, paediatrician fiancé at home (New Girl’s Max Greenfield, who has little to do but still nails even the laziest punchline).
Yet, what actually stuck out to me are the kind of mind-numbing conversations Isla and her social circle like to have: where they constantly have to correct each other to use the term “sex worker” and not “prostitute”, and always with an exaggerated sigh; where Isla refuses to learn the word “Doljanchi”, in reference to the Korean celebration of a child’s first birthday; where they run e-mails through chat GPT and make small talk with Scott Disick.
Isla is profoundly hypocritical in ways the series never points out, to the point it makes me wonder whether it even knows she’s being hypocritical. In short, Isla lives in a wasteland of generic obnoxiousness. She’s the kind of person who sits next to you at a bar and has a conversation so loud and wilfully ignorant that it burrows into your brain like a parasite; the kind of person that forces you to silently turn to your friend to confirm their behaviour with a discreet eye roll. And that doesn’t make for fun television.
Running Point was originally sold to Netflix by Elaine Ko, of Only Murders in the Building and Modern Family, before she left the project with Mindy Kaling, who in turn roped in Ike Barinholtz and David Stassen. So we should be in firm, largely wholesome sitcom territory.
Yet, Running Point starts with Isla attempting to quote Anna Karenina’s famous first line, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” She can’t remember it. She tells us she dropped out of college (as if that’s the only reason anyone would ever read a book), so instead comes up with: “All happy families are the same but all fucked-up families are fucked up in different ways.” This story, supposedly, is about one of those “fucked-up” families—only, Running Point could really do with being a whole lot more fucked up. This is just dull.
