Netflix drops all 10 episodes of The Hawk this Thursday, July 16, giving Will Ferrell his first credit as the creator and star of a scripted television series after building a film career on sports parody. The full season lands at once rather than rolling out weekly, per Wikipedia.
The setup
Ferrell plays Lonnie Hawkins, a nickname on tour is “The Hawk,” who topped the golf rankings in 2004 and hasn’t come close since. Years past his athletic peak, he’s fixated on winning the one major he needs to complete a career Grand Slam, convinced he still has the game to pull it off even as everyone around him has stopped believing it. Netflix’s own marketing frames the show around that gap between what Hawk’s body can still do and what his ego insists it can, based on promotional materials reviewed by Deadline.
Streaming specifics
New episodes hit the platform worldwide at midnight Pacific Time on July 16 — 3 a.m. for viewers on the East Coast — with the entire season available in one drop rather than a weekly release schedule, NetflixLife reported. Netflix has rated the series TV-MA, citing strong language, violence, and drug and alcohol content.
Who’s in it
Molly Shannon plays Stacy, Lonnie’s ex-wife, while Jimmy Tatro portrays Lance, Lonnie’s son and a rising star in professional golf. Lance represents the new generation of the sport and stands in contrast to his father’s fading career.Fortune Feimster, Luke Wilson, Chris Parnell, Katelyn Tarver, and David Hornsby fill out the rest of the main ensemble, according to a cast breakdown from ComicBasics.
Getting to the screen wasn’t quick
This show spent roughly three years in different forms before landing where it is now. Netflix first announced the concept back in April 2023 as an untitled comedy about a rival golf league, with Ramy Youssef initially attached to co-star and co-write. Youssef exited in 2024 alongside fellow writer Josh Rabinowitz over creative disagreements, effectively sending the project back to the drawing board. Shannon boarded the retooled version in August 2025, and the rest of the cast — Tatro, Feimster, Parnell, Tarver, Hornsby — followed a month later. The show didn’t settle on the name The Hawk until March 2026, GoldDerby detailed in its coverage of the project’s history. Production also lost some time in November, after Ferrell sustained a minor injury away from set that pushed a handful of scenes further back in the schedule, per Deadline’s reporting.
It’s not faking the golf world
What separates The Hawk from a typical studio sports comedy is that the PGA Tour actually signed on as a partner rather than licensing its name from a distance. That relationship gave the production access to shoot at genuine tour stops, including footage captured at the Waste Management Phoenix Open, TVInsider noted in its rundown of the series.
Why now, specifically
Dropping the show in mid-July puts it right in the middle of the PGA Tour’s summer stretch, when golf already has more casual eyeballs on it than usual. It’s also a continuation of a bet Netflix has been building for a while — the streamer’s live Netflix Cup special tested whether audiences would treat golf as watchable entertainment outside of a traditional broadcast, and The Hawk is the more ambitious follow-through on that idea, based on analysis from TechTimes. The show also joins Running Point, Netflix’s basketball comedy, in building out a small but growing sports-comedy slate.
Familiar ground for Ferrell
Golf is really just the latest sport Ferrell has turned into comedy raw material. He’s already covered NASCAR in Talladega Nights, figure skating in Blades of Glory, basketball in Semi-Pro, and youth soccer in Kicking & Screaming — this is simply the first time he’s stretching that formula across a TV season instead of a two-hour runtime. In something of a coincidence, Luke Wilson’s brother Owen Wilson currently stars in Stick, his own golf comedy over on Apple TV+, meaning two well-known comedic families have golf shows competing for attention this summer.
