Korfball, a real sport in the Netherlands, sets up the premise for this episode of Going Dutch. Captain Maggie (Taylor Misiak) shines in this episode after she goes nuts with repressed competitive spirit.
The writing enjoys itself during the korfball competition, setting up the Americans as unnecessarily aggressive and humorless athletes. Captain Maggie jubilantly screams into the occupied womb of her pregnant opponent and leads her team with a chant of “Kill the Dutch!’ Another highlight is the callback to “korf boy”, a made-up aspect of the Dutch sport where a local boy blows a single-toned, rustic animal horn after each point and performs jazz during halftime.
Where the writing falters is when Denis Leary tries to deliver everyman comedy. I do not believe Denis Leary has ever tried Ranch dressing, probably because I can only see him and reference him as Denis Leary.
Captain Maggie screams at Denis Leary during Korf Boy’s halftime performance and it was really effective for me (and, if you look at Denis Leary, he looks genuinely shocked by her outburst too). I appreciated how this episode’s arc resolved more neatly than previous ones, with both Maggie and Denis Leary realizing they both knew to “push the only button available to me to motivate a member of my team.”
Like the previous episode‘s dirty sex jokes, I was surprised by the frequent references to suicide in episode four. Maggie assigns “suicides”, or running drills, for the team and two scenes later says her team’s performance makes her want to kill herself. Early in the next episode, Maggie again talks about shooting herself in the head. She appears to be the only character so far who talks about suicide so much.
As mentioned in the last Bunny Ears blog, online content like TikTok channels and YouTube videos adhere to much stricter censorship guidelines if they want to generate income. I don’t have enough exposure to or knowledge of this industry to understand why these discrepancies are so severe, but it remains odd and unexpected to this infrequent network TV watcher.
