Review: ‘Brockmire’ Is the Dystopian Baseball Comedy We Need

The final season of the IFC series about a debauched play-by-play man takes an eccentric but well-timed jump into the future. You’re having a lot of television pushed at you right now — shows to comfort you, shows to remind you what a mess the world is. For a show that splits the difference, try IFC’s “Brockmire”: a sharp-tongued baseball comedy that, in its fourth and final season, takes an odd and oddly prescient dystopian turn. In the eight-episode season (beginning Wednesday), the comeback of the formerly disgraced baseball announcer Jim Brockmire (Hank Azaria) reaches its apotheosis.

After a career-ending on-air meltdown, he had already progressed from a period of Asian debauchery to minor-league announcing and, in Season 3, a return to sobriety and the major leagues. The show could have ended nicely there, but Azaria and the creator and head writer, Joel Church-Cooper, decided to stick around and take it on a tangent. Season 4 jumps ahead 10 years and installs Brockmire as the new commissioner of baseball. The inmate is officially running the asylum.

The twist is part of an endgame retooling by Church-Cooper that takes the show off track but, in the light of the Covid-19 panic, looks foresighted, too. The baseball owners gamble on the foul-mouthed, thoroughly unqualified Brockmire because they’re desperate — the world is falling apart and so is their sport. Victims of a Lassa fever epidemic are being burned in piles, winter is a distant memory, and elective euthanasia is available at doctors’ offices. Parts of the Southwest are a lawless region called the Disputed Lands.

Baseball attendance is down because “a bad flu season and rolling Medicare outages” are killing off its aging fans. In a poll of American 10-year-olds’ 100 favorite sports teams, the most popular major league team is 81st, behind a fifth-ranked Italian soccer club. Even as satire, it’s a lot of weight to put on a sports comedy that’s essentially a character study, and longtime fans of “Brockmire” may not be happy with the changes. As the episodes skip from one opening day to another, and as Brockmire’s successive strategies to revive the game — colored bats!

Classic Baseball! — flame out, the level of savage energy and inventiveness aren’t what they were before. And while the focus of the humor has always been on Brockmire’s dysfunction and his deliciously profane and literate rants, delivered by Azaria with splendid aplomb, the new season demonstrates how important the actual presence of baseball — as engaged in on the field or seen from the announcer’s booth — has been to the show.