Netflix provides a first look at its adult animated series Hoops

Hoops is Netflix’s upcoming adult animated series from creator Ben Hoffman (InfoMania and the Late Late Show with The Unfunny James Corden), and written in conjunction with Annabel Seymour and Mike Gibbons. It’s produced by 20^th Century Fox Television (greenlit before Disney’s buy-out of 20^th Century Fox became official) and Bento Box Entertainment (the studio behind Bob’s Burgers and Netflix’s own Paradise PD).

The series will consist of ten thirty-minute episodes, and follows newly-appointed high school basketball coach Ben Hopkins in his quest to create a winning team. There are just a couple of problems: He’s a terrible coach and his team sucks. It stars the voice of Jake Johnson as Hopkins, who brought Peter B. Parker to life in 2018’s superb animated feature Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, as well as the ever-present Ron Funches, Rob Riggle, Natasha Leggero, Cleo King, and A.D. Miles.

The official plot synopsis is as follows:

Hoops centers around a hot-headed, foul-mouthed high school basketball coach who thinks turning around his God-awful team will take him to the “big leagues.”

Let’s take a look:

Honesty, based on this small taste it could go either way. I appreciate a good f-bomb as much as the next guy, but they overused it a tad here which caused it to lose effect; if you’re going to go for an expletive-filled rant at least have some variety. What did make me chuckle though was the basketball itself – the sound of it forlornly bouncing to a halt each time while everyone else was dead quiet tickled me. Animation-wise this seems fine, nothing special but not noticeably poor either, and that small sample of voice work isn’t much to go on. I’m willing to give it a chance though.

What do you think?

The first season of Hoops will premiere on Netflix on 21 August.

Last Updated: July 21, 2020