In Big Shot, Disney Plus’ delightful dramedy from the blockbuster creative team of David E. Kelley, Brad Garrett and Dean Lorey, John Stamos plays Marvyn Korn, a legendary college basketball coach who, during an effective opening montage, throws a chair in rage, hits a referee, and is instantly cancelled. Toxic and unemployable, the only job his agent can get him is as the coach of a high school basketball team at an elite all girls school. It is an opportunity that could go one of two ways, being either the pathetic and ignoble end to an illustrious career, or a chance at redemption.
Umapagan Ampikaipakan: So here’s the thing. I am not a sporty guy. I’m lazy, and overweight, and really dislike sweating. And unlike you Bahir, I am also not a sports guy. I don’t have a favourite football team. I’m not gaga for Rafael Nadal. And I couldn’t explain how cricket works if my life depended on it.
Yet, despite my complete disinterest in sports, I am inexplicably drawn to the subject as a piece of genre fiction. I will obsessively watch every sports related movie or TV show I come across. God help me, I will never get bored of the idea of a group of inept misfits who come together, find themselves, and go on to be champions. I love me a good underdog story.
And let me tell you, between Last Chance U, Ted Lasso, The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers, and now Big Shot, I am completely spoiled for choice.
Bahir Yeusuff: Sports is capital “D” Drama. There’s a ticking clock, a goal to achieve, and you have to do that by relying on the person next to you. It’s like a war movie. Except with fewer deaths.
Now, Big Shot premiered around the same time as another sports series on Disney Plus, The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers. Both look a little similar, but Big Shot is just so much better. Now don’t get me wrong, The Mighty Ducks is fine, but it really feels like a sit-down-with-the-kids series. This series is slightly more grown up. Yes, it’s about high school basketball, but it’s also about fake social media personas, about not being recognized for who you are, and about daddy issues. This is a series about teamwork, about being a good friend, and about leadership. Big Shot is the better of the two. There, I said it.
UA: I think both shows cater to very different demographics. I honestly love them both. The Mighty Ducks has a real nostalgic appeal for me as I grew up loving those movies. (Seeing Emilio Estevez back as Gordon Bombay doesn’t hurt either.) But you are right about Big Shot having a much broader scope.
The thing that I loved most about the first episode is that it didn’t go the way I was expecting it to. We’ve seen our fair share of TV shows and movies that center around a character like Stamos’ Marvyn Korn. We think he’s going to be that archetypal asshole who needs a break from his ego before he can find his heart. But this show doesn’t give us that. Korn isn’t an awful person. He’s every person. Flawed in some ways. Human in many others. He just loves his job, and sometimes his passion – and arrogance – makes him say some mean things. He’s not averse to change. He’s not unwilling to learn new things. It’s a very layered depiction of the character. Which also meant that this show didn’t just fall back on the same tropes to tell its story.
BY: You’re right. But it also doesn’t pander one way or the other. Coach Korn isn’t your typical rough, tough, coach guy that gets his cold, cold heart thawed by the Disney sweetness of these girls he’s coaching. Big Shot doesn’t do the gritty realism and double down on Coach Korn’s machismo and borderline toxic masculinity either. The series shows us that there is a happy middle ground where the girls’ realize that basketball is more than just extra-curricular for them and Coach Korn realizes that he doesn’t need to be shouty McAngry-face all the time.
I rewatched the pilot episode of Friday Night Lights a couple days ago and, in the opening scenes of that, Coach Taylor gets his entire team to “tackle” one of the players that has shown up drunk. I can’t remember what I was thinking when I first saw that scene, but in 2021, it made me feel a little weird. There’s a hazing/ragging/toxic masculinity in sports that is in some ways expected.
Big Shot opens like that. Coach Korn is not expecting a group of girls who aren’t really taking this seriously. He won national championships goddammit. They had a statue of him at the previous place. But instead of forcing the girls to meet his masculinity, they take it down a notch. Now I know that sounds like some millennial new age feelings stuff, but it’s never too much here. It’s never cloying or saccharine. There isn’t a big moment where Coach Korn realizes that he needs to change his ways after having done the girls wrong. And I really appreciated that. As much as Big Shot may feel like a show for an audience to empathize with the high school girls in that team, it’s also written for people who are in Coach Korn’s shoes.
UA: Which is why this show works as well as it does. There’s a meeting of minds between Korn and his new wards. They’re both learning from one another. They quickly realise that there is real value in the experience and world view of the other person. I enjoyed how neither side was dismissive of the other. Once they got past the knee jerk, there was always a conversation that would serve to undercut that initial tension.
A lesser show would have fallen back on that to create drama where there was none. To stretch it out over the cause of multiple episodes, creating unnecessary conflict, and resulting in a frustrated audience. In Big Shot, arguments and fights are resolved in the same way you would in real life. Korn’s daughter, Emma, doesn’t stew over three episodes before calling him out on his bullshit. His assistant coach, Holly, isn’t just quick to disagree with him, but provides actual solutions. But most of all, this isn’t a show that falls back on tried and tested TV punchlines. Every time I thought I knew how a particular scenario was going to play out, Big Shot would throw me for a loop.
There’s one particular moment in Episode 4 (and I won’t spoil it here) involving a school news report that was played cunningly well. Not for drama. But for real character growth instead.
BY: That was great set up and pay off. I was beginning to roll my eyes thinking that this was the point the show would turn and be everything that I was expecting. But that reveal really showed me that the writers knew what they were doing, and that this wasn’t just another sports drama.
UA: The cast here is also fantastic. The girls on the team, lead by Nell Verlaque’s Louise, are all distinctive and interesting. Sophia Mitri Schloss who plays Korn’s daughter Emma is great in playing that old soul trapped in a teenager’s body. But it really is Stamos that makes all of it work. He is, after all, a sturdy and reliable veteran of television, so it should come as no surprise that he has great comedic chemistry with everyone on this ensemble.
BY: Oh, absolutely. It really feels more like an ensemble piece. As much as it might seem like it’s made for John Stamos, the girls on the team, Holly, Yvette Nicole Brown’s headmistress, all these characters bring something to the table. They are layered and are more than just people in Coach Korn’s way.
BY: I for one can’t help but compare it to The Mighty Ducks: Game Changers which, despite my earlier complaints, is a show that I do watch. It’s just that I always feel like I enjoy my time with Coach Korn more. The Mighty Ducks feels very much like a throwback to an earlier Disney sports movie, whereas Big Shot feels like something new. Very much like Ted Lasso was when I first saw it.
In the most recent episode they dodged the whole “Coach Korn is better now, so he can come back to college ball” thing, which I really appreciated. Again, all the cliche plot points are here, it’s just that the show does them differently. Korn’s daughter comes and lives with him and starts to get to know a boy? There’s none of the usual drama there either! I love it.
So, what are you hoping for next? What big revelation are you seeing?
UA: I’m hoping for seven seasons and a movie.
But seriously, I am enjoying how they’re subverting all of those typical tropes. There is this idea that great fiction cannot exist without conflict. And it’s true. Characters that have clashing philosophies and ideologies are far more interesting to watch. But what Big Shot does is tackle those conflicts in a very adult manner.
Ted Lasso is another great example of a show that does the same thing. All throughout that first season, you were waiting for some big blowout between Ted and Rebecca, but the writers pulled the carpet from under you and found themselves another, more novel way to keep you invested.
Suddenly, these characters and storylines that at first felt familiar, become something new for you to discover. But to answer your question. I honestly have no idea what’s going to happen to Korn, or Emma, or the Sirens. I can’t tell with this show. And I’m loving that.
BY: All I know is they might need to play a couple of games on the road.
Big Shot being on Disney does it a slight disservice. In that the Disney name makes you think of a very specific kind of show. And this does some of that and is immediately recognizable as a Disney product. But it does so much more as well.
I also think the show plays very well as a weekly series. If this was an all episode drop on Netflix, I think I’d have forgotten about it. But here, the cliffhangers and the multi episode arcs, pay off so, so well.
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