First of all, this is not a show about baseball any more than Bull Durham or The Bad News Bears. Baseball is merely the backdrop for a show about a middle aged man's self-destructive spiral into the abyss. And what a ride it is. The show is driven by the scathingly funny monologues, and Hank Azaria's brilliant deadpan delivery in full-on sports announcer persona. One of my favorites is about straight white men having reoriented our national sexual interest toward women's breasts, and how black and gay men are now bringing it back to women's butts... where it belongs.The show may be all about Azaria, but some of the supporting players are outstanding. Joe Buck does a sensational job of playing Joe Buck, and there a loads of cameos by other sports personalities, most of whom are better comic actors than you'd expect.Yes, the show is raunchy. Yes, the show glamorizes drug and alcohol abuse. Yes, the near-constant sex does smack a bit of the objectification of women. But this is a comedy and not a public service announcement. I urge you to give it a chance.

The series had me with "a walk-off balk." Never heard of that one before but in baseball anything, and I mean anything, is possible. Just like this show could be possible. I've seen a lot of crazy things in my years watching and playing the game. The two protagonists are great together and Hank Azaria is perfect as a baseball announcer. The show is a great blend of humor, sex, and baseball. Three things that just go together and you can keep the apple pie.

The irreverent and bawdy show on IFC tells the tale of a sports announcer fallen from grace after an on-air meltdown mounting his comeback in a small town in Pennsylvania. Jim Brockmire (Hank Azaria) is the famed sports announcer who used to be the voice of baseball in Kansas City until his wife Lucy (Katie Finneran) reveals to him that she has been having all sorts of sexual escapades while he was away. Jim breaks down and loses his career spending years shamefully hiding in foreign countries. He returns to American sports when Jules James (Amanda Peet) hires him to announce for a minor league team and generate some controversy for increased attendance.While drinking heavily since Jules also owns a bar, Brockmire finds comfort being behind the microphone once again for the Morristown Frackers. As the Frackers win after Jules and Brockmire have a one-night stand, the two continue to have superstitious sex so that the team can keep up the streak. Helping promote Brockmire and Fracker online is Charles (Tyrel Jackson Williams) who helps Brockmire's rants go viral. Check out more of this review and others at swilliky.com

"Brockmire," starring Hank Azaria and Amanda Peet, is frankly hilarious. (The highlight of this show are the jokes in the dialogue, so summarizing the plot so far doesn't really amount to the disclosure of too many spoilers.) This has to be the show meant to be created just for Azaria (and primarily by Azaria), although it began as one of a set of Funny Or Die videos. He plays an on-the-precipice-of-irretrievably-washed-up baseball announcer Jim Brockmire, whose acidly cynical prose and foulest of mouths serves up a nonstop flood of hardball commentary and darkly comic social poetry. He hates the world, people, his life and his part in it, and yet he loves baseball because of its potential for purity and poetry, but also for how ridiculous a spectacle it can often be. Brockmire, who had been among the gold standard of announcers in the bigs, gets fired for cause by a team in K.C. after an extended, alcohol-fueled, on-air rant about deviant sex practices involving his ex-wife, later succinctly captured by the term "Lucy-ed." After wandering in overseas venues for 10 years (including a stint calling cockfights in Manila), he alights in Morristown, Pa., an economically dispirited town where the local off-off-off market semipro ball club, the Frackers, must compete with meth, the other low-cost form of recreation in the area. The team are a sorry lot of uniquely untalented, skinny geeks, plus several morbidly obese hackers, and one former big leaguer of actual talent and Latin origin, Uribe (played with swagger by Hemky Madera), who has tons of la Postura. All of the Frackers worship Brockmire for the sake of his middle aged bad boy YouTube profile, of which, as the show begins, Brockmire himself was wholly unaware. While overseas, he missed the whole Internet thing, which eventually involved Drake writing a lyric about him "keeping it Brockmire." Peet plays a smart baseball idealist and owner of a local bar that she inherited from her Dad, who was a Pirates fan. She sold her house and took out a mortgage on the bar to buy the downtrodden, fleabag Frackers. She gradually convinces Brockmire of the insane gonzo quality of him doing play by play commentary over the P.A. system in the stadium, for perhaps the worst pro ballclub in existence, but she has plans to build up the team's public persona. Tyrel Jackson Williams plays a socially awkward tech geek who becomes Brockmire's social media assistant, and he adds the vibe of someone fascinated while watching a car wreck's aftermath. There's a gag in which one shirtless local fans busies himself by stripping and repairing a lawnmower engine in an otherwise vacant section of the stands. The writing in this show is outrageously, caustically, and obscenely funny, and Azaria's glibly sour delivery is damned near perfect. Yes, it's gimmicky. But it's the best kind of gimmicky. As Brockmire's call of an improbable grand slam homer, with three severely obese players jamming the bases (they all got hit in their capacious guts or asses by pitched balls), unwinds over the stadium P.A., "OHhhh, that ball cannot go to Jewish heaven because it got TATTOOED! One THOUSAND pounds of finely cured Italian meat come waddling home, folks, it's a Grand Salami!" The language and sexual innuendo here are not for the prude, it's IFC that's airing this, so that shouldn't be a surprise. One wonders, as others have pointed out here, how far the writing can take this concept. The first season is 8 half-hour episodes, and a second set of 8 has been ordered. The Bad News Bears was outrageously funny, once, in a single perfect film, but the sequel films and the attempted TV show couldn't recapture its magic. It appears, however, that cameos by baseball media figures are on tap for Brockmire, as well as the very funny beer ad that aired with episode 3. In the meantime, batter up, Brockmire's acid wit is at the plate, and the rye (and wry) is being poured.