Brockmire

When Brockmire is in the broadcast booth, Azaria’s arias of baseball lore are mesmerizing and witty, but the show also relies too frequently on jokes about Brockmire leaving the microphone open during embarrassing moments.

Brockmire gets off to a very funny (and very vulgar) start. I don't know how long the premise will hold up, but it begins with a lead-off hit and scores multiple runs.

Brockmire doesn’t throw a perfect game on its first trip to the mound, but it gets most of its pitches across the plate--and even delivers some surprising dramatic brushbacks.

Azaria and Peet are great, together and separately. Both bring a humor and sympathy to characters that might otherwise prove difficult to tolerate, let alone like.

Later episodes suggest Brockmire will try to become a better person. That’s a bad call. The fun is watching him spin out of control like a drunk pitcher’s fastball.

Each episode provides everything you would want from a comedy: originality, elegantly crude humor, genuine warmth and heartbreak.

This series has issues, but much like its titular character, if you can look past them you'll find Brockmire a true diamond in the rough.

If you loved the baseball film “Major League” but always wished Bob Uecker’s broadcaster character had been darker and more bawdy, this is your show.

The plot is consistent--completely ridiculous from the first of the eight episodes to the last--but credibility isn’t anyone’s concern here.

The other half of what makes Brockmire special--raunchy and depraved, but also surprisingly tender and even romantic (imagine Catastrophe if most of it took place at a minor league ballpark)--is how Azaria and the show’s creator, Joel Church-Cooper, are able to find the vulnerable human being underneath the accent and his familiar plaid blazer, even as Brockmire never breaks character or stops talking like he’s doing play-by-play on his own life.

Over the course of the eight episodes, Brockmire moves through a trio of arcs, delivering underdog sports hijinks, the Jules-Brockmire romance and Brockmire's sad and probably doomed search for redemption. That's all propped up with enough low-brow jokes, raunchy baseball references and disreputable hijinks that the show never wallows.

Yes, this story’s kind of been told before, in various places, and in various forms over various decades--but with not nearly as many vulgar words called into service here.

Brockmire is a weird, funny portrait of a singular man, and it paints its picture very well--working both as a snapshot of this aging oddity of Americana and a universal story about a washed-up person coming to terms with himself, despite several drunken efforts to the contrary.