Netflix’s New Basketball Sitcom, ‘Running Point,’ Scores from Downtown

The new sitcom Running Point, which premieres on Netflix today, has several creators. Elaine Ko spent years writing Modern Family. Ike Barinholtz is a prolific character actor on everything from Blockers to The White House Plumbers, not to mention a Celebrity Jeopardy! champion. David Stassen is a writer and director whose credits include History of the World: Part II. But the fourth creator — Mindy Kaling — is the only one who’s parlayed her work writing on and co-starring in The Office into becoming a brand. Now, she’s the mogul behind Never Have I Ever, The Sex Lives of College Girls and The Mindy Project. She’s the social media maven with a signature swimsuit line; and if she hasn’t quite reached mononym status yet, the brand-new star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame gets her just a little closer.

Given all we have come to know about Mindy Kaling, from the material her shows have covered, and just generally since she’s been a public figure, her working behind the scenes on a show about a woman taking over as president of a pro basketball team seems like a potentially perilous idea even before you see a trailer in which said female president walks directly into a glass door. But, amazingly, Running Point sidesteps the worst girlboss clichés, and is much more than Legally Blonde on a basketball court.

Kate Hudson stars as Isla Gordon, only daughter of the now-dead Jack and the youngest child from his first marriage. In his day, Jack was a legend as the owner of the Los Angeles Waves (which, like all NBA teams mentioned in the show, is fictional — though it’s at the center of a very real lawsuit from Pepperdine University). Jack made the Waves a family business: Since his death, Isla’s eldest brother Cam (Justin Theroux) has been president; her next oldest brother Ness (Scott MacArthur), retired after playing in the Philippines, is general manager; and her younger half-brother Sandy (Drew Tarver) is CFO. After Isla spent years acting out to get attention — partying in public, posing for Playboy, entering into a stunt-y celebrity marriage that lasted less than a month — Cam tried to sort her out by putting her in charge of the team’s charity projects. 

Isla is a true student of the game who has ideas about how to run the team, but her brothers don’t take her seriously. Then an unexpected situation arises that requires Cam to name a new president, which everyone assumes will be Sandy or Ness. But Cam shocks them all by saying Isla is the best person for the job. Her Chief of Staff Ali (Brenda Song) celebrates this victory, but adds, “You can never fuck up”: a man can have endless chances, but a woman has to be perfect immediately. As someone whose only experience making news is with her own self-created scandals, Isla is alarmed. But, perhaps in part because one of the show’s many executive producers is Jeanie Buss — the current president of the L.A. Lakers, and the real-life daughter of legendary NBA team owner Jerry — Isla quickly finds her way.

Speaking as only a basketball fan of the fakest kind — I loved HBO’s Winning Time so much that I’m currently reading the book it was adapted from, and I own a Gonzaga basketball hoodie but only because it’s my dad’s alma mater — I have no idea how any of Running Point’s sports scenes play for someone who does follow the game. (I will say that everyone across the sports-y spectrum is probably united in thinking that Chet Hanks, who plays point guard Travis Bugg, is a little short to play professionally; Google says he’s 5-foot-10, which probably means 5-foot-eight.) For both practicality and accessibility, basketball game play is kept to a minimum, and mostly for physical comedy purposes, as when undrafted rookie Dyson (Uche Agada) gets an unconventional free throw lesson, or when Isla tries to take her floor seat at the wrong moment and gets bowled over by players going out of bounds. 

Mostly, Running Point is a workplace sitcom like any other show set in the office of a multi-billion-dollar business; that said business is pro sports is, at least for this sports abstainer, incidental. I won’t pretend to have followed every beat of the rapid-fire negotiation, among Isla and two other owners, that closes the first episode, but I got the gist: When Isla disagrees with a trade her brothers want to make, she can’t just dig in her heels and refuse; she has to come up with another move and make it work. 

She doesn’t always, though: not every risk she takes pays off, since the show wouldn’t be credible if Isla were a perfect tactician. And her screw-ups blow back on her from some sources her father never had to deal with, like social media and rapid-response gossip blogs; and some he did, like loudmouthed sports podcaster Sean Murphy (the great Jon Glaser). It should be no surprise that Hudson plays Isla — an heiress looking to distinguish herself in the family business — like she’s been in the role all her life, and shifts from bubbly to ballbuster with ease.

The nature of the company means the work gags and the family gags sometimes cross over. Which is it, for instance, when Ness’ wife Bituin (Jessalyn Wanlim) kicks him out of the house so that Sandy finds him sleeping in his office in tiny briefs and yells at him for not just going to the Peninsula like every other rich guy with marital problems? But partners are of secondary importance to the show — and, usually, to the characters — well behind the siblings’ relationship. The writing is particularly sharp in portraying the mostly unacknowledged trauma they all experienced growing up as Jack Gordon’s children: the competition for his love left them scrambling over each other as kids like crabs trying to escape a cooking pot, and this tendency persists in adulthood, as they can’t trust one another entirely and settle disputes with threats or outright violence. 

A plot twist I’m not supposed to reveal does shake up the family’s equilibrium; the length of time it takes to develop does feel dramatically realistic, but also shows why a 10-episode TV season can feel so chintzy: even just a couple more episodes would have helped to pay this storyline off.

That’s not the only reason I would have liked more episodes. The structure of the show means there are more than a dozen main characters, and they don’t all get their due. For instance, a plotline about hazing Dyson by making him take his turn picking up a five-figure restaurant check for a team dinner, even though he’s the only player who isn’t a millionaire, gives a tantalizing glimpse at the teammates’ dynamic that I wish we could have seen more. I also question giving one of the more emotionally fraught stories to Hanks, who’s clearly doing his best but is not even up to COLIN Hanks standards, never mind Tom. 

The show is pretty up-to-date in its references, but it’s also missed the anti-billionaire turn culture has taken, and is aiming for a post-racism vibe which (a) we’re not doing anymore, and the NBA maybe never did — that’s right, I also watched Clipped! — and (b) is particularly off-tone for a story about white businesspeople making their money off the labor of mostly Black workers. But the show moves as quickly as a basketball game, and when I say the jokes fly too fast for the viewer to be overly critical, I mean it as a compliment. Nothing bearing Jeanie Buss’ name — to say nothing of her fellow EPs Jordan Rambis and his mother Linda, the son and wife of Showtime-era Laker Kurt — was going to tell an unvarnished story about the league. Anyway, HBO already tried that with Winning Time, and no one watched but, improbably, me, so it’s no wonder Netflix didn’t want to try that approach again.

Running Point is a charming show that lets a lot of very funny stars play around. Whenever you have March Madness downtime, give it a shot.