In Season 3, 'Full Swing' struggles to connect until it's too late

Each season, Netflix's “Full Swing” features dozens of players, spouses, children, commentators and other personalities around the world of professional golf, but it's hard not to conclude that the show's favorite character is “Full Swing” itself. This belongs to the class of documentary that can't resist showing off its means of production—a clapping slate, a producer's voice—and if it were possible to get Vegas odds on how the very first scene of the season would play, the heavy favorite would have paid off. Action:

Production Assistant, off camera: “Justin Thomas, take one.”

[Slate claps]

Producer, off camera: “JT. Season 3.”

Justin Thomas: Yeah, Season 3. ‘Full Swing.’ Let's do it.

[cut to Amanda Balionis]

Amanda Balionis: “Season 3!”

If you hadn't guessed by then that you were watching Season 3 of “Full Swing," the cavalry was on its way: more slates clap over more famous faces, Tom Kim tells his puppy "you're on Season 3 Netflix, buddy," and within five minutes, they even get Ben Stiller on camera saying, "I started watching ‘Full Swing,’ it's great. … It's really well done."

This is nothing new—“Full Swing” has always been a show that insists on itself—but where in past seasons the self-consideration verging on narcissism seemed like tactical bombast, promoting something bigger, louder and sexier, now all that "this ain't your daddy's golf" bravado feels like insecurity. When you're afraid that you don't have the goods, one time-honored strategy is to loudly proclaim that you have the goods.

If this sounds a little brutal so far, rest assured that at times in its third season, “Full Swing” really does have the goods, mostly in the final two episodes. In fact, the very last scene of the last episode is classic “Full Swing”: just when you feel at your most underwhelmed, they hit you with something so jaw-dropping that it not only makes the entire ride feel worth it, but instantly adds a level of almost delirious intrigue to the 2025 season. (I won't spoil it, but I won't need to—it involves Keegan Bradley, and you're going to be seeing it everywhere soon enough.)

Other times, though—frankly, too often—they're drawing dead. In the trailer, there's a focus on Scottie Scheffler's arrest, Rory McIlroy's divorce, Bryson DeChambeau's comeback from the dire days of 2021 and the U.S. Open drama at Pinehurst. As it happens, they end up putting all four of those stories in one episode, and from my perch as someone who was very excited to get new information or at least a deeper perspective from the main figures on any one of them, the result is a significant disappointment. There's just not much there that you haven't seen, and it seems that the principal characters—all of them featured subjects this season—simply didn't want to talk about it.

That's their prerogative, of course, but it had to be frustrating for “Full Swing” producers, and once you see how little they mined, it actually makes sense why it's all contained in a single episode. They have to let the momentum of the events carry the action, but the problem is you end up feeling like you're watching a highlight video you’ve already seen rather than a new documentary. Where they do try to delve into deep waters, they’re forced to pull off a series of MacGyver editing acts. In attempting to explain how tough it was for DeChambeau to overcome the death of his father, they flash an Instagram post on the screen. When it's time to ask Rory about the divorce-that-never-was, they get a "nothing to see here!" quote. With Scheffler's arrest, there are a few chuckles and not much more.

Elsewhere in the season, there are some baffling omissions. Wyndham Clark and Tom Kim are both featured subjects, but when it's time for the Presidents Cup episode, the incredible Saturday night match between Tom Kim, Si Woo Kim, Patrick Cantlay and Xander Schauffele is conspicuously absent, and the verbal spat between Clark and Kim immediately after goes totally unmentioned. Perhaps Clark and Kim explicitly asked or insisted that they omit it, but to have nothing up close and personal on a story that falls squarely in your "reason for existence" zone … well, that feels like a miss. And if it's the case in all these examples that their hands were tied, maybe the shackles have become too tight.

While we're enumerating complaints, there is also the persistent feeling from past seasons that the talking heads are being fed their lines rather than speaking them organically, and that certain proclamations are meant to build drama in ways that stretch belief (the show's depiction of Gary Woodland and Camilo Villegas was mostly superb, but the assertions in the final two episodes that they're "one of the most beloved players on tour" is not based on any reality I recognize). There are narrative issues, too. We see a full hour of Olympic build-up, but aside from a throwaway mention in an earlier episode, you’d barely know Scheffler won gold. And in a throwback to Season 1, the coverage of majors seems disjointed at best. (It must have been annoying for the producers that Xander Schauffele, who allegedly had a major hand in limiting their Ryder Cup access last year, won two of them.) In these moments, it becomes impossible for “Full Swing” to feel immersive.

"Immersive" is what it badly needs. “Full Swing” has always been best when it can spend real time and unearth real truths from its subject, and it has always been the case that the less famous the subject, the better the material. They score minor successes introducing us to Ludvig Aberg and Neal Shipley, and an episode on caddies is very good, but the true highlights of the season come at the end (unlike past seasons, there are seven episodes rather than eight). In the penultimate episode, Justin Rose once again proves to be a shockingly good documentary subject, and the story of Woodland's recovery from brain surgery is gut-wrenching. With subjects like these, “Full Swing” manages to get out of its own way and—pardon the language—cut the bullshit. The filmmaking is superb when they trust the story, and suddenly everything they touch is self-assured.

In the final episode, it's puzzling at first when they focus on Villegas and his wife Maria, until the couple tells the story of their daughter Mia, who passed away in 2020 just shy of her second birthday because of tumors on her brain and spine. If you manage not to spend the majority of this portion of the episode in tears, congratulations, because you've done better than me. (There's an exchange on the topic of living with a child's death, between Maria and Mike Weir's wife Michelle Money, that is particularly unforgettable.) From there, the Presidents Cup coverage is solid beyond the baffling Saturday omission, and it ends with fireworks that make you say, “Where was this show all season?”

The big takeaway here, that “Full Swing” rises to greatness when it gets personal—when there's a heart behind the drama—and falls flat when it stays broad feels familiar from past seasons. You could call it status quo, and if that's true, it'll be interesting to see what “status quo” means for the show's future. Count me as someone who hopes it continues indefinitely, despite my gripes, but according to Netflix, Season 2 had 28.1 million viewing hours compared to 53.1 million hours for Season 1. For comparison's sake, “Break Point”, Netflix's equivalent tennis documentary, went from 30 million hours to 13 million hours in the same time period, and was not renewed for a third season. “Full Swing” will be at the mercy of broader trends in golf viewership, and if it does end up in a fight for survival, those of us who root for it will wish we had more often seen the heart that it could only sometimes find.