Created by Mindy Kaling, with her “Mindy Project” co-star Ike Barinholtz and producer David Stassen, “Running Point,” which premieres Thursday on Netflix, is an adorable workplace family sports comedy set around a fictional Los Angeles basketball team, the Waves.
The shorthand pitch might have gone something like “Ted Lasso” meets “Succession,” but it’s less sentimental than the former, much, much sweeter than the latter and less “naturalistic” than either — by which I mean, it lives in that particular cozy unreality known as situation comedy.
Kate Hudson stars as Isla Gordon, who, with two brothers and a half brother, is part owner of the franchise, passed down from their late father, a “creep” under whose stewardship the team nevertheless won a lot of trophies. Under oldest brother and team president Cam (Justin Theroux), the streak has extended … until lately. (Team with a problem — needs solving!) It was Cam who brought Isla into the organization, as its coordinator of charitable endeavors, as a remedy for embarrassing rich-girl behavior, including a Playboy spread, a 20-day marriage to Brian Austin Green and general hard-partying. (It’s a job at which she’s seen to be good, being good.)
Ironically, it’s Cam’s own bad behavior that kicks the series off. Smoking crack and driving fast and furiously along the coast, he runs into a family of Dutch tourists (unseen, unharmed) and appoints Isla interim president while he’s in rehab, trusting neither of his brothers to handle the job. Brother Ness (Scott MacArthur, consistently amusing), the team’s general manager, is a lovable lunkhead of no discernible abilities — and no portrayed responsibilities — but is “the only Gordon who could actually play ball” (and the players like him). Younger half brother Sandy (Drew Tarver), who is as well put together as Ness is disheveled, is the CFO; his apparent primary qualification for that job is that he’s cheap.
As in “Ted Lasso,” and innumerable stories in myriad settings, this is a tale in which the seemingly wrong person chosen, or forced, to lead an enterprise is revealed to be exactly the right person. (After some missteps and seasoning, naturally — chief of staff and best friend Ali Lee, played by Brenda Song, is her Jiminy Cricket: “On behalf of all women,” says Ali, “don’t ever make a mistake. It looks bad for all of us.”) What makes Isla the right person, besides her lifelong love for and knowledge of basketball, which the men in her family have dismissed, is that — like Ted Lasso — her heart is (relatively) pure, a “weakness” she will have to leverage as a strength.
Her appointment is greeted skeptically, to understate the case, by her brothers, the team, the sports commentator played by Jon Glaser and Vegas oddsmakers.
I have no idea how basketball works apart from the dribbling and throwing the ball in the net, and the business of picking and trading players is an impenetrable fog to me; you don’t need to know those things to enjoy the show. But Isla understands, and we understand, that whatever she doesn’t know yet, she’s cleverer than the doubters give her credit for. (This doesn’t keep her from repeatedly walking into a glass door, or falling off her exercise bike; Hudson is a game clown.)
More troublesome are the big personalities she’ll have to manage, including Travis Bugg (Chet Hanks), a rude, crude, tattooed player with a sideline in rap; and Marcus Winfield (Toby Sandeman), the team’s aging star, who carries himself like royalty and has a line of wellness products at Target. A smaller personality who will also need managing is rookie Dyson Gibbs (Uche Agada), brought up from the Waves’ development team, the Long Beach Raccoons.
Into this congregation comes Jackie Moreno (Fabrizio Guido), a Boyle Heights teenager who sells peanuts and popcorn at the Waves’ stadium and suddenly learns that he shares a biological father with the Gordons — his mother was the housekeeper — and that he’s entitled to a share in the business, which he regards as a community. Is he therefore a problem to be made to go away? An opportunity for growth? An avenue for comedy? That last one, certainly; Jackie is a sweet, innocent goof and Guido is very funny playing him.
Anyway, there’s a lot going on; 10 episodes afford plenty of room for episodic adventures to feed the longer arcs. It’s more than a sports story, of course — the team will win or lose, but winning isn’t everything and losing isn’t the end of the world. Family is the greater subject, as will be made explicit from time to time. Apart from the sibling relationships, Isla has a longtime fiancé, Lev, a pediatrician (Max Greenfield, in a more relaxed role than he often plays); Ness has a wife, Bituin (Jessalyn Wanlim); Sandy has a boyfriend, dog groomer Charlie (Scott Evans), whom he is not bringing around to meet the family. And there’s Jackie, and the team itself, which is, it will be said at least once, part of the family. Obviously, not everything will run smoothly. It’s a hectic show, full of disaster even as it’s full of love.
The series begins with Isla offering a more profane version of the oft-quoted Tolstoy observation that all happy families are alike, but each unhappy one is unhappy in its own way. But in the world of situation comedy, unlike that of prestige drama, unhappy families are all potentially happy families, or actually happy if only they knew it. The work of the sitcom is to waken them to this fact — as often as it takes.
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