Editor’s Note: Season Two of Full Swing was released on Netflix today, March 6. MGS had early access to the show and will be publishing commentary on the series throughout the week. This article includes spoilers.
A year after making its debut, Netflix’s “Full Swing” series is back.
Similar to Season One, this latest season is eight episodes long and chronicles all the drama within professional golf throughout 2023—and there was no shortage of that, right?
“Full Swing” Season One was watched for more than 53 million hours over its first five months, making it the 267th most-watched Netflix show in the February-June time period.
While it was a far cry from Season Five of the Formula 1 series “Drive to Survive” (90.5 million hours) that served as a model for a golf version of the show, the audience was much larger than the similar “Break Even” tennis series (30.5 million hours) released around the same time in 2023.
Some of the initial metrics from last year were encouraging. Nielsen data showed that 63 percent of “Full Swing” viewers tuned in to PGA Tour coverage in the two months following the series debut.
Throughout this week, I’ll go through all of my thoughts about Season Two of the show.
Overall Review
We’ll cut right to what you want to hear: How does Season Two compare to Season One?
I would give a slight edge to this newest season.
It comes out of the gate swinging with two very strong episodes and then one phenomenal episode. The remainder of the season falls off from that peak, in my opinion, but still has a smattering of noteworthy moments in the final five episodes.
Is it worth watching? For the first three episodes, absolutely. You aren’t missing a ton if you skip the rest but I certainly don’t think you’ll regret finishing out the season.
Looking back at Season One, there were some memorable parts. Brooks Koepka surprised everyone by showing his mental vulnerability in Episode Two, Joel Dahmen proved to be a breakout star in Episode Four and family man Tony Finau tugged on heart strings in Episode Six.
I would argue there was also a lot of fluff that looked scripted and contrived. Episode One with Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth felt like it was produced by a PR team. Some of the characters involved (Mito Pereira, Collin Morikawa, Matt Fitzpatrick, Dustin Johnson and others) came across as a little bland.
As a die-hard golf fan, I found myself uninterested for much of Season One. There was so much over-explaining of basic golf elements—it felt like a show geared exclusively toward casual fans with only a few nuggets worth watching for hard-core fans.
Honestly, that is totally fine with me if it resonates with people. Not everything has to be for the golf sickos. The point of the show is to get people excited about golf, especially those who aren’t familiar with the game.
However, the opening of Season Two offers a ton for hard-core fans. Even for someone who follows every granular part of the game, there were a handful of behind-the-scenes segments that forced me to rewind and listen again just to make sure I heard it correctly.
Episode Three is brilliant and should win some sort of an award.
I was pumped to continue watching once I reached the beginning of Episode Four but the season stalled at that point. A lot of the same issues from the first season reappeared. It felt like too much filler and not enough of the interesting behind-the-scenes footage that got me excited about the first three episodes.
There are a few cool scenes as the show goes on but, mostly, it doesn’t compare to what we see early in the season. It gets heavy on highlights without adding further context.
My overall grade would be B+. This continues to be a fantastic marketing tool for golf. Respect to the producers who combed through 900 hours of Netflix-shot footage (plus 10,000 hours of archival footage) to put this together.
Episode Breakdowns
The tone is set by Rory McIlroy, who is remarkably unfiltered in Episodes One and Two.
He drops at least a dozen F-bombs and oozes transparency, saying what golf fans were thinking when it came to his role as a leading voice on the PGA Tour.
“Why the f— did I spend 12 months of my life fighting for something just for it to come back together?” McIlroy muses near the end of the first episode when the framework agreement between the Tour and Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is announced.
And then at the beginning of Episode Two: “I’m almost at the point where it’s like, ‘F— it, do whatever you want.’”
Prior to that, he also has a pretty stunning quote while in the locker room after the PGA Championship.
“My technique is nowhere near as good as it used to be,” McIlroy says after his tie for seventh at Oak Hill. “I almost feel like I want to do a complete reboot. It’s the only way I feel like I’m going to break through. It feels so far away. I’m not at the stage in my life where I feel like I can do these two-week bootcamps.
“I feel good enough to f—— top 10 in my head but I’m not good enough to win. Like pull away. Like winning f—— majors.”
It was an incredible description of how frustrated he was with his golf. Undoubtedly, the stress of his role in pro golf politics contributed to the frustration.
A month later, he came one stroke short of winning the U.S. Open. Not bad for a guy who wanted to tear apart his swing and start over.
Episode Two leans into the June 6 framework agreement between the PGA Tour and the Public Investment Fund, including a brief scene at Tour headquarters where Commissioner Jay Monahan discusses how players will react to the startling news.
“I suspect the answer I have will not be palatable to the people in the room,” Monahan says in advance of his meeting with Tour players.
The first two episodes stay in chronological order (unlike the next four episodes), exploring the dichotomy of the PGA Tour and LIV.
On the Tour side, there are two players (McIlroy and Rickie Fowler) who are clearly being eaten up by their performance struggles and other burdens. It’s made obvious that both of them play the game primarily for the fulfillment of competition.
On the LIV side, there are two players (Koepka and Johnson) who seem released from that worry, given the choices they’ve made to take guaranteed money.
The two episodes served as a captivating time capsule that represented the division in pro golf, and the producers picked the perfect characters on both sides.
It was a stroke of genius to match Fowler (a player who was a prime candidate to go to LIV but decided to fight his way through poor golf) with the carefree Johnson (who comes across as bored with pro golf and describes his U.S. Open prep as “lazy”).
In Episode Two, Johnson shares his opinion why Tour players should not be financially rewarded for their loyalty in the event of a pro golf coming together.
“The guys who went to LIV, we took a lot of criticism. We’re the ones who took the risk for everything so why should they be compensated?”
It was a moment that underscored the disconnect between Tour players and LIV players.
But just when the first two episodes bombard you with the burden of money and pro golf’s fractured landscape, it’s all washed away in one of my favorite pieces of long-form golf content I’ve ever seen.
Episode Three (“Mind Game”) is a true work of art and, by my estimation, easily the best episode of either season that “Full Swing” has to offer.
Starring Dahmen and U.S. Open champion Wyndham Clark—two players who lost their mothers as teenagers and have struggled mightily with mental issues on and off the course as they grieve—the episode goes deep on how Dahmen avoids therapy while Clark embraces his inner demons.
“Being famous and shooting 76 is the worst f—— thing in my life,” Dahmen laments.
One man actively confronts his pain, the other trys to push it down. The whole episode explores the effects of those choices.
Dahmen and his caddie Geno Bonnalie are somehow more relatable than ever as they navigate a dark period in Dahmen’s career. And Clark’s willingness to detail his story of perseverance will gain him millions of new fans.
The episode digs well beyond the scope of golf. It’s a human interest story with heart.
Even if you don’t watch all of Season Two, I highly suggest watching Episode Three. You don’t need to see any of the other episodes for it to make sense.
My word for the rest of the season is “frustration.” The final five episodes largely reminded me of an “Inside the PGA Tour” style of show where we get an overview of players and tournaments—but there is no compelling angle.
Maybe casual fans will connect with it more but my wife (who casually follows golf) felt the same way as I did.
Tom Kim, a fun-loving 20 year-old with three Tour wins, is the subject of Episode Four.
I’m a Tom Kim fan. He is wholesome and seems like a great guy. I just don’t think there is enough depth to him at this stage in his career.
He has yet to encounter any meaningful adversity as a golfer. At the same time, Kim also hasn’t won enough against the best players to become interesting from that perspective. He has two fall season wins and one victory in a regular Tour event, all with relatively mediocre fields. He’s not a Morikawa kind of figure yet.
They tried to manufacture adversity in the episode but it didn’t work for me. This is a guy with full Tour status and immense talent. We see a lot of him getting lost in clubhouses—including at Augusta—and parking in the wrong spot, which is an amusing storyline. Battling through an ankle injury in the Open Championship is interesting to a point but the producers overplayed their hand.
Fitzpatrick and his younger brother, Alex, are the main characters of Episode Five. This one did have the makings of a meatier concept as the episode revolves around Alex starting his pro golf career in the shadows of his U.S. Open-winning brother.
However, I just don’t feel much of anything toward the elder Fitzpatrick. He doesn’t draw much emotion, positive or negative, out of me. Maybe I’m in the minority here but I’m surprised he was featured so heavily in both seasons.
For my money, Alex is the more entertaining brother and shines through here. It just feels like a lot of “telling, not showing” as we would say in the journalism business.
The rest of the season turns its attention toward the Ryder Cup.
Is there anything new we didn’t already know? Not much.
The series works extremely hard to make the U.S. team selections look like a battle between the in-crowd and the ostracized. While there is some level of truth to this dynamic, “Full Swing” fixates too hard on this point.
Thomas and U.S. Ryder Cup captain Zach Johnson are the main characters for Episode Six but we also get a heavy dose of Keegan Bradley and his emotional plea for a captain’s pick.
I was bothered by this episode. The show manipulates the audience into thinking Bradley should be a shoo-in captain’s pick if not for the “buddy system” politics of the American Ryder Cup team.
Reality was not nearly as interesting: Bradley had one top-10 finish in his last 14 events leading up to the selections.
We are also inundated with “player and wife interacting with their family in a beautiful home” scenes while the player utters vague platitudes. I’m not sure what anyone gets out of those.
The Ryder Cup coverage in the final two episodes is almost all highlights with little added context—Netflix was not allowed in the American team room, which might have had something to do with it—but I will highlight a few parts that stood out to me.
European captain Luke Donald throws out this line (with some foreshadowing) about Johnson’s captain’s picks: “I don’t think (Johnson) picked the strongest team statistically.”
Johnson gives us this on the way to the first tee for the afternoon session after the Americans were swept in the morning session: “Let’s give these guys a f—– answer.”
(Narrator: They did not.)
You might be wondering whether we get any new footage of the now-famous incident involving Patrick Cantlay, Joe LaCava and McIlroy on the 18th green during Day Two of the Ryder Cup.
We do. It was calmer than I thought it was but heated by golf standards.
I was particularly amused by Shane Lowry yelling, “Hey, Joe, get out of the way, you prick.”
That night, a group of European players are walking away when these words are uttered: “They’re gonna f—— feel it tomorrow.”
It’s a nice recounting of the event for those looking to relive it but you won’t get many “wow” moments out of it.
Episode Ranking
- “Mind Game” (Episode 3)
- “The Game Has Changed — Part I” (Episode 1)
- “The Game Has Changed — Part II” (Episode 2)
- “All Roads Lead to Rome — Part II” (Episode 8)
- “Prove It” (Episode 4)
- “In the Shadows” (Episode 5)
- “Pick Six” (Episode 6)
- “All Roads Lead to Rome — Part I” (Episode 7)
Final Conclusion
We are all starved for positive golf content. The pro golf landscape is bleak on many levels, especially given how we aren’t getting any news of unification. In fact, that might even be falling apart.
Golf fans are the biggest losers in all of this.
Season Two of “Full Swing” is a positive. Hey, we’ll take it. The series successfully delves into those divisive topics and has some interesting behind-the-scenes footage, even if it doesn’t fully deliver.
There are some down episodes but the high points are well worth the watch.
Stay tuned to MGS for two more pieces on “Full Swing”—my winners and losers and the most captivating quotes from the series.
Nik
1 month ago
Sean, I would argue that Season 2 was slightly weaker, but primarily because they went so hard on the Ryder Cup. If you include Episode 6 (which was almost exclusively Who’s On The Roster) you have an eight-episode season where three full episodes are dedicated to one golf event.
These three episodes don’t just provide little new information beyond the outcome of the Cup, they give so little that these episodes are a waste if you watched any of the Cup or its highlights *raises hand*.
I understand revisiting the same event from multiple players’ perspectives, and as such, I don’t care that they kept going back to the US Open or WM Open, but going forward I think these are their options.
EPISODE TYPE 1: Introducing fans to little-known players like Tom Kim and Alex Fitzpatrick. This is excellent content, but none of these players have enough oomph to get a solo episode – do them in pairs like Theegala and Pereira last season.
EPISODE TYPE 2: Continuing the season story of a player like Rory who will have an interesting season/story (and a willingness to share) every year.
EPISODE TYPE 3: Covering the story of a specific event, like the Ryder Cup, or a particular news topic. But if you focus on a tour event, do it in a way where the results are the sprinkles on the cake, not the flour in the batter.
Season 2 derailed for me when they gave *a third of the season* to one single event, and then added very little beyond the event results because they weren’t granted access to do so.