Sunday night saw the highly anticipated Season 3 premiere of Ballers, HBO’s R-rated comedy set in the world of professional sports. Or, more accurately, Sunday night saw the narrowly anticipated Season 3 premiere of Ballers. The series has exactly one famous fan, but she’s a very famous and very enthusiastic fan: Sen. Elizabeth Warren. As Uproxx documented and Samantha Bee further explored, Sen. Warren has unaccountably taken every opportunity to promote the spiritual successor to Entourage, mentioning it in her new book, working it into a Facebook post about Writers Guild of America contract negotiations, and even exchanging tweets about it with series star Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson:
Ballers hasn’t exactly dominated the cultural conversation since its first season, but what the creator of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau wants, the creator of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau gets. So here’s a recap of the Sunday night’s season premiere of Ballers, “Seeds of Expansion,” which was definitely not the first and only episode I watched. The show’s return was written by Entourage vet Rob Weiss and directed by Entourage vet Julian Farino, who as of Sunday has helmed 12 of 21 Ballers episodes. That means just one person—the top 0.000000013 percent—now controls 57 percent of the Ballers directing jobs in the entire world, which seems like the kind of factoid that might explain Warren’s interest in watching the show.
After a not very Elizabeth Warren–y credit montage of sports footage and wealth porn over Lil Wayne singing “Don’t like my women single—I like my chicks in twos”—stealth Warren/Gillibrand 2020 endorsement?—we enter the third season of Ballers with a pick-up basketball game in the back yard of a very expensive house. It belongs to Ricky Jarrett (John David Washington), who keeps fouling the other players and lying about it until everyone gets fed up with his cheating and storms off, much like the American people are finally getting fed up with scofflaw billionaires and their rigged financial games. Will this set the stage for a classic “triple double” in the midterm elections, with progressives “running the floor,” as one “floater in the key” campaign after another “puts up numbers?” Only Elizabeth Warren and the anonymous author of NBA.com’s “Basketball U on Hoops Lingo” article know for sure.
But the easy parallels between Ballers and Sen. Warren’s one-woman war against a bunch of rich crooks end with the basketball game. It turns out Jarrett is in a bad mood not because the rich are killing people for pennies but because he thinks he’s gotten his girlfriend (Brittany S. Hall) pregnant, which prompts a bro-y conversation about birth control between him and Dwayne Johnson’s character, Spencer Strassmore. We all have problematic faves, but there miiiiight be a little bit of daylight between Warren’s position that birth control is a fundamental right and Strassmore’s boast that he doesn’t always bother with condoms because “my pull-out is straight 100, brother.” It falls to Jarrett to point out that Strassmore might be shooting blanks, sending the ex-football player into a death spiral of embarrassing fertility-related Google searches. For a giant of a man like Johnson, the image is as incongruous as, say, the senior senator from Massachusetts googling “Ballers recap Season 3 premiere.”
But sperm and sexism are only the beginning of Spencer’s problems. His business partner Mr. Anderson (Richard Schiff) wants Strassmore’s help convincing Steve Wynn–analog Wayne Hastings Jr. (Steve Gutenberg!) to let him buy his way into the casino business. In exchange, Anderson promises to help Spencer land Steph Curry, who shows up for one of those “We’ll come to you!” cameos in which he is never on screen with anyone else on the show. Keeping with the seeds-of-expansion theme as well as the why-does-Elizabeth-Warren-like-this-show theme, most of the office talk revolves around who has bigger balls.
There’s a little bit of track-laying for the season to come—Reggie (London Brown) has printed some shirts with marijuana leaf logos for Vernon without telling Spencer, and Charles Greane (Omar Benson Miller) holds a disastrous press conference in the midst of a back-office shakeup—but there’s not much wasted space, particularly when compared to other HBO shows. Besides, the press conference scene has the episode’s single best moment: a cameo from Larry Csonka, who opens his remarks like a Trump flack, telling reporters: “Let me start by saying: There is no power struggle.” Back in the B-story, Jarrett heads to his girlfriend Amber’s house to confront her about her pregnancy. Amber denies she’s pregnant, which prompts Jarrett to confess that he’d care if she were having his kid, which eventually creates the conditions of emotional intimacy necessary for her to confess that, in fact, she is pregnant. It’s kind of like how every time Elizabeth Warren says she’s not running for president, everybody else says they’d support her if she did, except without the paternity suit and (so far) without the part where Warren admits she actually is running for president. Except Amber, to her credit, doesn’t try to change the subject to the 2018 Massachusetts senate race.
Meanwhile, after a pep talk from his other, less successful business partner Joe Krutel (Rob Corddry), Spencer manages to win over Wayne Hastings Jr. with an inspirational toast about how football helped him escape his roots in the mills of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. This leads to an astonishing countertoast from Hastings, who, the episode makes a point of telling us, inherited his father’s casino business:
I could go on forever about what I’m grateful for, but in addition to the race cars, the speedboats, the buildings bearing the Wayne name, I’m grateful for guys like Spencer: real men who roll up their sleeves and grind it out.
It’s a good joke, having Hastings put things in terms that—especially in the context of Spencer’s nightmare tour of the fertility industry and its “collection rooms”—suggest the masturbatory underpinnings of the right-wing fascination with “real men who roll up their sleeves and grind it out.” (If the Trump parallels don’t seem as obvious as the jerking-off parallels, Hastings also has an Eastern European wife.) That doesn’t bode well for Spencer, who ends the episode by pitching Hastings the idea of bringing an NFL team to Las Vegas together. Will this be one of those stories where going into business with an obscenely rich jerk works out well for everyone, or will the third season of Ballers suggest that there might be a downside to giving trust fund con artists unlimited wealth and power? Come to think of it, maybe it’s not so weird Elizabeth Warren likes Ballers after all.
