Running Point Season 1, Episode 9 Review – “The Playoffs”

For the majority of its first season, Running Point has fumbled its way through a number of identities; for its penultimate episode, “The Playoffs”, the underwhelming comedy made the insane decision to try and embody all of them in the course of the season’s shortest episode. The result? One of the most haphazardly arranged scripts of recent memory, an episode that whiplashes between a half-dozen, half-baked stories as it tries to synchronize their big climactic moments, accelerations of narratives that ultimately, only reveal just how unconvincing its many stories feel.

And it’s not for lack of having interesting catalysts for narratives; take the episode title, “The Playoffs”, for instance. An opportunity for Running Point to really dig into the team dynamic, how the odds are stacked against them, to explore the personalities of players like Marcus and Travis within the team dynamic, and give us a glimpse into what’s happening on and off the court now that the “real” season has begun. Unfortunately, the only basketball featured in this episode takes place completely off-screen, the only mentions of the team coming when Marcus shows up in Isla’s office, and when Isla hears the Waves have won their first playoff game on the radio.

So what does it offer instead of that simple, effective source of tension, one that could unify the show’s plots and characters around one shared objective? Well, “The Playoffs” begin, for the second episode in a row, with Isla using sleeping with someone (this time, her best friend’s fiancée) as the driving example behind (what is presumably) the episode’s defining pathos; sometimes the “right thing” isn’t always obvious in the moment, and that there’s something about the Gordon DNA that is able to take those leaps of faith and stick the landing. Seems an easy thing for a comedy to build a few stories around, yes?

Turns out it isn’t; all of sudden, instead of focusing on the insular tensions it has developed all season, Running Point centers an alarming amount of “The Playoffs” with Isla’s mostly-forgotten fiancée Lev becoming a source of tension, when he realizes nobody, including Isla and the audience, give a shit about him (at one point, he fakes having a dental implant, then chides Isla when she lies about remembering it). When Isla forgets and clearly is going to miss Lev’s pediatric awards ceremony, her focus solely on her career turns Lev into a pouty bitch – which, of course, was not a point of legitimate concern until the final seconds of “The Streak”, when Travis interrupts their conversation to inform Isla of his addiction.

Which itself turns out to be a non-story; “The Playoffs” (which is also a bad title, since 99% of this episode takes place before the first playoff game, against a team we don’t even hear the name of) also posits that Travis’s burgeoning pill addiction is going to be a big part of this episode’s exploration of Isla’s decision-making, and how it weighs on her when she allows Travis to play. But she spends half the episode justifying the decision, only to drop it instantly the moment she arrives at Travis’s house and sees him high; there’s no consideration to even engaging with the more complex concept of Isla trying to guide a compromised Travis (who, we were told, wouldn’t give up the playoff run for anything since he’s in a contract season), just one scene where she sees him and takes him to rehab, a moment that leads to the implausibly cringe-worthy moment where Marcus hears Travis is out for the game, and grins to himself while he stands in front of his locker – an image so trite and undeserved, it reveals just how empty Running Point really is at its core, something it reinforces with each and every story in this episode.

Jackie’s sudden disappointment in his new family excluding him is another one; after being completely forgotten and unmentioned last episode, Jackie’s emotions are suddenly front and center when he helps Charlie plan an extremely lame, showy romantic gesture to his ex-boyfriend – but never gets to enjoy his new bond with Charlie, because at the end of every scene, Isla and Ness interrupt and pull Charlie off into a private conversation, leaving Jackie looking mournfully off-camera at the family he’s not accepted as a full part of (even though he’s only been a family member for a few months, presumably). This is after two episodes of him fucking everything that moves and getting chlamydia; rather than ground Jackie’s character in the principles and ideas introduced back in “Pilot”, Running Point seemingly goes out of its way to throw his character into random, meaningless stories only guided by a single punchline or emotion, the latter of which the series never spends more than a few seconds at a time alluding to before bringing it to the forefront.

And ultimately, it makes no fucking sense; for an episode that tells the audience over and over again that it’s about the right thing not necessarily being obvious or feeling good, “The Playoffs” spends the entire episode doing exactly that, its only counterpoint being when Isla predictably misses Lev’s awards show (the one she had forgotten about hours earlier). In every other plot, the solution is obvious: send Travis to rehab, sing Taylor Swift to your ex-boyfriend instead of the national anthem (a scene so awful and cringe, I almost had to fast-forward through it)… one could say Isla’s decision to send Travis to rehab instead of letting him play was where this episode connected itself to the flashbacks and monologue of the opening scene (another recurring bit I wish this show would do away with; it adds nothing to the series in the present), but even there – the right thing was pretty fucking obvious from the start, especially when Isla gets all contemplative and big-eyed when the suddenly-docile sports show host tells her how she’s “exactly” like the other members of her family (something she’s been openly proud of at other times, but is… suddenly concerned about here?).

Individually, the various characters and plots of Running Point are mostly logical; they are not exactly illuminating, heartwarming, or provocative, but there is at least a coherent thoroughline through all of those stories. How they are explored, and then assembled together, is where Running Point suffers the most; it just has nothing interesting, funny, or particularly poignant to say about any of its selfish, self-serving characters (Ness is another great example; there’s an incredible character arc with the son who tried and failed to get daddy’s love, tearing his Achilles as a Waves benchwarmer, but it’s but two lines of dialogue in nine episodes of TV), its incidental dramas nothing but manufactured nonsense, with no actual, coherent bearing on the stated themes and ideas at the heart of each episode.

As a playoff episode with no playoffs and a contemplative episode with no contemplation, “The Playoffs” is Running Point‘s biggest failure as a serialized dramedy and feel good family comedy; it is unable to find compelling stories within its extremely simplistic premises, and utterly fails to embody the spirit of its title and opening thesis, by delivering one of the most aggressively pandering, emotionally hollow episodes of television I’ve seen in 2025. And when “The Playoffs” makes its big emotional pushes – Lev leaving Isla, Sandy singing Taylor Swift (but with gay lyrics) – it unintentionally reveals just how empty and shortsighted the core of Running Point has been to this point, its identity nothing but an assemblage of concepts and ideas thoroughly unexplored in the show’s text (or in most cases, just taken from other, better series).

Grade: F