Sunshine review – basketball and racial tensions collide in standout Australian drama :-: the Guardian
The guardian Anthony LaPaglia’s school-of-hard-knocks coach brings star power to this superb new ser..
The guardian
Anthony LaPaglia’s school-of-hard-knocks coach brings star power to this superb new series set in outer-west Melbourne
Remember that movie or TV show with the jaded, world-weary, what-have-I-got-to-live-for coach who reluctantly agrees to mentor a team of ill-disciplined rascals? Remember how sport becomes a metaphor for life, and the determination, hard slog and gradual improvement of the kids inspires in this broken person a new raison d’être?
Of course you do, and of course you don’t. You do because this archetype is almost as familiar as the absentminded professor or the whisky priest. You don’t because you’ve witnessed so many incarnations of this character – from the stubby-clutching Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau and later Billy Bob Thornton) in Bad News Bears to the smug Gordon Bombay (Emilio Estevez) in The Mighty Ducks – that they blur together as one big, whistle-blowing splotch in the memory.