Jake Johnson Is Back!

To be certain, Jake Johnson hasn’t actually gone anywhere. Since New Girl ended, however, he hasn’t really had a hit, outside of his voice work in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. He’s made two television series (The Minx and Stumptown), both of which faltered — The Minx couldn’t find purchase on either HBO Max or Starz, and even if Stumptown had succeeded, who would’ve noticed Johnson when Michael Ealy’s beautiful sleepy eyes were consuming all of our bandwidth? Beyond that, he starred in a movie no one saw (Ride the Eagle), wrote, directed, and starred in another really fun movie that no one saw (Self Reliance), and did a lot of odds and ends — podcast series and episode appearances.

But the Jake Johnson era is back! He just finished a stint as a very effective a-hole ex-husband in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, he hosts his own podcast series (which is inescapable on my social media feeds), he has an NBC series, Sunset P.I., coming out later this year from Dan Goor and Luke Del Tredici, the co-creators of Brooklyn Nine-Nine (with Keith David and Jane Levy!), and he stars in the subject of this piece, Dink, one of the very few Apple TV original movies that’s actually good.

And it’s good because of Jake Johnson and Mary Steenburgen and Ed Harris. But mostly, it’s good because someone finally remembered that the underdog sports comedy formula is designed for movies, not for television (see The Hawk, Chad Powers). The underdog sports comedy is a vehicle for jokes and a jolt of triumph. If you try to extend it into a television series, the jokes get stale after a while, and you have to wait too long for that jolt of triumph. The formula works on television, but only as a drama (or dramedy), because you need relationships and character arcs and other melodramas to sustain it (see Friday Night Lights) — jokes aren’t enough.

Unless it’s 90 to 100 minutes, because that’s the right amount of time to deliver only your best jokes, pull your character (or team) out of the ashes, and end on a high note (victory!). Dink — from director Josh Greenbaum (Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar), working from a screenplay by Sean Clements (Workaholics) — gets it exactly right. It comes in, it makes you laugh, it delivers on its feel-good ending, and then the credits roll. A sports comedy should not make us work — don’t make me click the next button — it should entertain us while we’re eating a bag of popcorn.

Jake Johnson stars as Dustin Boyd, the archetypical sports comedy underdog. He was an aspiring tennis pro as a teenager, he flamed out spectacularly in a match against Andy Roddick, and he’s been working as a washed-up tennis pro at his dad’s country club ever since. The game of pickleball, however, is threatening the old-school ways of the club — a number of members want to replace some of the tennis courts with pickleball courts — and a contrivance is created so that the decision comes down to who can win a match.

It’s a tried-and-true formula, and it works! Dustin Boyd hates pickleball and wants to please his father (Ed Harris) by winning the match, but after his doctor (Ben Stiller) directs him to play pickleball while he recovers from a wrist injury, Dustin falls for the game — but mostly for the relationships he builds while playing it, specifically with Candace (Mary Steenburgen), an older woman who loves country music (it tracks, because Steenburgen is also from Arkansas). Because he realizes he’ll never be able to please his father, Dustin eventually agrees to play on the side of the pickleball constituency and, once again, he’s pitted against Andy Roddick.

I’m sure you can tell where this is going and that’s the whole point. You can gently subvert the formula or provide a fun twist ending in a sports comedy, but what you don’t do is extend it into multiple episodes (or even seasons). Dink doesn’t, and it’s a blast. Just a get-in, get-out good time that never overstays its welcome, features a few good pickleball action sequences, develops the characters enough to make them sympathetic, and goes home on a triumphant note. It doesn’t hurt, either, that Ed Harris is a fantastic comedy movie villain, and that Dink uses a proper country song to deliver the film’s moment of levity. B+ comedy. Good times.