Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		1.5
Overall		3.5

Ballers: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie Review

Show him your money.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman June 11, 2016

One of the standard lines that tends to be used in defense of the outlandish salaries granted athletes in any of a number of professional sports is that the “shelf life” of their careers is shorter than that of the average working stiff. Yeah, right—like any given cubicle jockey wouldn’t give their eye teeth for one year at $25 million or so, let alone several. But the fact remains that except for a tiny minority of professional athletes, a run of a decade is considered “long lasting”, and there are scores of former jocks who end up finding “retirement” unmanageable, and not necessarily for financial reasons. That’s all part of the subtext of the generally agreeable if at times formulaic Ballers, an HBO offering that features Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson as erstwhile National Football League superstar Spencer Strasmore, a guy who is still haunted by glories (and tackles) from his former life, and who is attempting to make a none too smooth transition into “ordinary” life as a financial manager. While played (at least at times) for laughs, Ballers has a kind of melancholic subtext which may recommend it to those who have reached middle age without realizing their dreams. Ironically, that’s because Ballers shows a guy at the cusp of middle age who did realize his dreams, but who now finds himself afloat in the sea of industry, more or less rudderless. The show tends to celebrate the testosterone fueled exploits of “boys behaving badly”, but at the same time it tends to peel back that facade to reveal both the ridiculousness and even the pettiness that often underlie such shenanigans. The first season of Ballers tends to meander a bit, going off onto various tangents to supposedly explore the show’s large (perhaps too large) supporting cast, but Johnson is such an affable presence that most fans probably won’t mind too much.

While never exploiting the issue as much as Concussion does, Ballers does deal with the trauma, both physical and (perhaps even more saliently) psychological that Strasmore continues to suffer as a result of his sports injuries (as well as injuries he himself delivered to other players). That gives the character a bit of nobility that his otherwise sometimes questionable behaviors wouldn’t suggest. At his core, though, Strasmore is a decent enough fellow, even if he doesn’t quite know where he wants to go, nor frankly how he’s going to get there. He’s upbraided in an early episode by the widow of a former colleague of his, who tells Strasmore point blank the he needs to get his (you know what) together. Strasmore, kind of like a recovering addict (and, frankly, maybe that’s what his relationship to football is like), responds with a familiar line that he’s working on it. Again—yeah, right.

What becomes clear over the course of a couple of episodes is that Strasmore, for all of his personal issues, wants to be a mentor to the younger generation of players entering the fray. Here Ballers tends to partake in a variety of character studies that tends to emphasize the party hearty atmosphere of professional sports, as well as the insane machinations that go on in terms of signings and the financial repercussions of young adult males suddenly being gifted with windfalls. The show hedges its bets in several regards, though, wanting the audience to believe that Strasmore is on the precipice of financial straits while still displaying virtually every conceivable sign of consumer excess (i.e., nice clothes, bling filled pad, groovy car, etc.).

Strasmore’s post-football career has taken him to the unlikely offices of Anderson Financial, a Miami based consulting firm which has hired Strasmore solely for his supposedly lucrative connections to the professional sports world. Strasmore’s own mentor is the unlikely Joe Krutel (Rob Cordrry), the kind of Everyman shlub who dreams of living the high life the way Strasmore once did, and who perhaps silently delights in seeing a former Football God cut down to size. The bantering rapport between Krutel and Strasmore provides some of the series’ most effective moments, as slight as they sometimes are.

There’s no question that Ballers takes pages out of both the Jerry Maguire and Entourage: The Complete Series playbooks (so to speak), and the fact that these referents are so easily spotted may be the series’ biggest hurdle going forward. While most if not all of the characters introduced and at least partially explored in the first season are interesting, a lot of them seem awfully familiar, and the series’ attempts to inject style in the place of actual content only ends up paying intermittent dividends. The interesting thing about this is that some of the most compelling emotional content comes not courtesy of Strasmore’s travails (such as they are), but in the sidebar material, especially with regard to another former player, Charles Greane (Omar Miller). Charles’ post- football life is considerably more mundane than even Strasmore’s, and some of the dilemmas he faces have a ring of authenticity that some of the other plot machinations never really attain.

Ballers: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Ballers: The Complete First Season is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of HBO with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 1.78:1. The IMDb lists this series as having been digitally shot with one of the newer Arri lines, the Amira, but those familiar with the look of the Arri Alexa will find themselves right at home with the visual presentation on display throughout the first season. Arri's own press for the Amira states that the technology offers "dynamic range of more than 14 stops, low noise levels, subtle highlight handling, natural color rendering, breathtaking skin tones and speeds of up to 200 fps." The look throughout Ballers is typically sleek and smooth, with excellent detail levels, especially in close-ups. While noise is indeed a non-issue here, I'm not so sure about the "subtle highlight handling", especially since the directors and/or cinematographers of the first season tend to shoot into (or at least toward) bright light sources so much of the time, leading to near blooming and a loss of fine detail at times (see screenshots 18 and 19). The series is undeniably scenic, though, and the bright outdoor scenes (which are numerous) pop quite winningly.

Ballers: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Ballers: The Complete First Season has an intermittently raucous DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track. Surround activity perks up in expected sequences like big party scenes or even practices on the field, where good attention is paid to discrete placement of ambient environmental effects and background hubbub. While not basking in any kind of superb immersion, quieter dialogue scenes also resonate effectively, with excellent fidelity. There's considerable "oomph" to elements like the bone crunching sounds of tackles or even the roar of sports cars.

Ballers: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Disc One

• Inside the Episodes (1080i; 13:45) offers brief overviews of the five episodes on this disc.

Disc Two

• Inside the Episodes (1080i; 15:06) offers brief overviews of the five episodes on this disc.

Ballers: The Complete First Season Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Ballers: The Complete First Season may not be "must see TV", but with the undeniable charisma of Johnson front and center, it's often an ingratiating enterprise, and one that has a certain ring of truth about it even when it's exploiting some fairly fanciful plot turns. The show might do better to concentrate on just three or four characters, rather than zinging off into innumerable sidebars, but the good news is that virtually all of the characters introduced in the first season are interesting in their own right. Technical merits are excellent and even without much in the way of supplemental features, Ballers: The Complete First Season comes Recommended.