Ballers Review

Stephen Levinson builds the show around one correct instinct: put Dwayne Johnson in a suit, make him the most competent and most anxious person in every room, and keep the camera on him. Spencer Strasmore is a retired NFL player turned financial manager for active ones, which lets the series run on the thing pro sports fiction usually skips, what happens to the money and the body after the playing stops.

When it stays there it is good. Johnson plays a man managing chronic pain and other people's disasters behind the same smile, and it is the most controlled work of his career. Rob Corddry gives him a partner who is genuinely funny rather than comic relief, and John David Washington turns Ricky Jerret into the most volatile and most alive person on the show well before the rest of his career explained why.

Reviewers on arrival called it Entourage relocated to football, which is fair, and the coverage thinned every year until the last two seasons drew almost none at all. The complaint is structural. Each season sets up a crisis over a client, a contract or a franchise, resolves it in a conversation, and starts the identical shape again. Nobody changes.

The Miami photography is expensive and empty in exactly the right way for a story about people buying things they cannot afford, and the banter is quick without being memorable. HBO ends it after five seasons as the audience drains away, and it has since found a second life on streaming with viewers who want precisely what it delivers. A B is what a show earns when the star is the entire reason it works and everyone involved knows it.