Series / Brockmire

Rock bottom of the ninth

An IFC comedy starring Hank Azaria, adapted from a series of Funny or Die videos.

It's 2007. Famed baseball announcer Jim Brockmire is doing his usual thing...until he mentions his wife. Turns out Jim recently walked in on her in an orgy with half the guys in the neighborhood.

What follows is an on-air meltdown of spectacular proportions, Jim becoming an internet sensation, losing his job and dropping off the face of the earth.

A decade later, he's resurfaced in the backwater hovel of Morristown, Pennsylvania. The owner of the awful local team has offered the down-on-his-luck Brockmire a job as PA announcer to drive sales. With not much else to do and a general love of the game, he accepts and becomes the voice of the Frackers.

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Provides examplles of:

• Abusive Parents:
  • Jim's father was a complete monster as a parent. Jim sums it up best with his monologue in "Retirement Ceremony".
    Jim: So he stormed back into the house and nuked up some fish-sticks till they were just hotter than the sun, and then he screamed into our faces when we wanted to wait for them to cool down. I don't remember anything after that except waking up in the emergency room where Gina and I had 3rd degree burns.
  • Charles’s family is not much better. His parents are very emotionally and verbally abusive towards their son, and constantly undermine whatever he does. It seems to have resulted in Charles constantly seeking out toxic relationships, including his relationship with Jim, and later his psychotic girlfriend, Denise.
• Adam Westing: Real life announcers Joe Buck and Tim Kurkjian appear as themselves in "Old Timers Day". Dan Patrick, Kenny Mayne, Rich Eisen and Bob Costas also appear in small cameos.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: In season 4, Limon's motives are...mixed. She doesn't want to destroy humanity, in fact she wants Americans in particular to have more children, but mostly because she needs soldiers to fight the evil Chinese Limon
• The Alcoholic:
  • Jim is this and then some.
  • Jules applies as well. Jim attributes their chemistry to having the exact same level of functional alcoholism.
• Ambiguously Bi: Though he hasn't outright said it, Jim's hedonistic years abroad seem to have expanded his sexuality a tad.
  • Uribe. Dear Lord, Uribe. "As long as I'm inside a woman, nothing you do to me is gay. So do a lot of it."
• Big Applesauce: The final season takes place mostly in New York after Jim is made Commissioner of Baseball.
• The Big Easy: After ditching Morristown at the end of season 1, Jim finds his way to the booth in New Orleans.
• Big Prick, Big Problems: Matt Hardesty would regularly boast about the size of his penis, and would occasionally show it off. Later when he's dying of cancer, he confides in Jim that he's never fully been inside a woman. Many like to try, but he just can't fit it in there. In his own words, "It's like using a hammer to knit."
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: Charles has quite the family. An overly critical, ex-military father who considers right on time to be late. A narcissistic, emotionally manipulative mother. Two weird, vaguely robot like sisters. And Terry.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Jim is a damn good announcer, all things considered. He can segue from an insult, to the game and back again like clockwork. He also speaks several languages. Including Japanese (Thought not fluently), Spanish and Filipino.
• Despair Event Horizon: Jim hits the lowest of low points during "In The Cellar". It takes dancing on MDA while the woman who tried killing herself in front of him cries for him to finally give up and get sober.
• Dying Town: Morristown is your sadly typical, slowly withering small town.
• Game of Nerds: Jim may be a washed-up, hollowed out shell of a man, but he still loves baseball.
• Godwin's Law: Jim somehow ties spitting your chew on the floor to being like Hitler while off-screen.
• Hypercompetent Sidekick: Charles is this for Jim. Doing his best to manage his career, while dealing with his insufferable personality.
• Jerkass: Jim is a bitter, insulting A-hole.
  • Jerk With A Heartof Gold: He does, however, have his moments, like when he and Jules throw a get-together for Uribe and his kids. He has a habit of saying incredibly kind things that shock the people he's saying them to, simply because he's a self-centered prick 90 percent of the time.
• Jerkass Realization: Jim realizes during "Old Timers Day" that it wasn't Lucy cheating on him that made him an asshole. He's just always been one.
• Last Disrespects: When Jim returns home for his abusive dads funeral in "Retirement Ceremony" he lets it rip on what a scumbag he was. Followed by pouring a little liquor on his bloated carcass.
  Jim: Drink up.
• Littlest Cancer Patient: Jim invites one to the booth during "The Getaway Game" to try and make himself more likable. But instead of a cute and inspiring bald one, he gets one so hooked up to machines and off-putting that he's not even shown fully on camera. Which also sends him into a rant on mortality and gets him suspended for a game.
• Memetic Mutation: In-Universe: "Keep it Brockmire" is still a common saying 10 years after Jim's incident.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: When Jim finds out he only got the pro announcing job in Atlanta cause retiring announcer Art Nooley is a racist douche, he decides to expose his attitude on-air. This gets Jim fired, gets Whitney fired for suggesting him, doesn't get Raj hired (as management feels like they'd just be caving to pressure by hiring a minority announcer) and does nothing to Art, as he was retiring anyway.
• Mr. Vice Guy: Uribe is a washed-up Dominican ex-Major Leaguer who loves drugs and sex as much as any man on Earth, and has 13 kids by several women, but he's also shown to be a fairly good-natured guy who is a loving parent.
• Person as Verb: "Lucy-ing" apparently became a catch-all term for a woman doing a guy up his backdoor, after Jim vents about it during his meltdown.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: The Frackers are a terrible excuse for a team. Their one strategy seems to be letting three fat tubs get beaned, then having a good batter hit a grand slam.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Beth gives one to Jim in season 4, after finding out her mother died and he's been lying to her during her entire life- and he would have kept lying had she not found out.
  Beth: Your supposition is that you were a bad person, and then a good person, but I contend you've always been the same shitty person...you are the same terrible person that you've always been!
• Serial Numbers Filed Off: In-Universe: During his time in seclusion, Jim stared in a blatant, Filipino version of Hart to Hart. According to him, Robert Wagner was not happy.
• Small Reference Pools: An unusual inversion. What a podcast is is explained for the benefit of the audience, but ASMR videos are later alluded to without any such explanation, despite being a far more niche subject.
• Status Quo Is God: A big subversion. After the first season is about Jim, Jules and Charles in Morristown, season 2 has Jim and Charles move to New Orleans with Jules appearing only a few times. Season 3 has a now sober Jim announcing spring training baseball in Florida for the Oakland A's. And season 4 is the biggest subversion of all, jumping forward in time ten years to 2030, where Jim is named Commissioner of Major League Baseball.
• STD Immunity: Completely averted. Jim has picked up quite a few unsavory conditions from his sleeping around.
• Time Skip: "In The Cellar" skips a year ahead at the halfway point. Picking up with a now clean Jim working at a sober living facility.
  • Season 4 skips ahead 10 years to 2030 and covers a period of about 5 years.
• What You Are in the Dark: An interesting variation in Season 4. when Brockmire admits to his daughter that he has no memory of her mother because he was blackout drunk back then, he says he can only imagine what horrific lies he must have told to trick a woman as intelligent and savvy as Beth's mother into sleeping with him. It turns out, he didn't do anything awful at all; they bonded over baseball.