TV Review: BALLERS: Season 1, Episode 5: Machete Charge [HBO]

HBO’s Ballers Machete Charge TV Show Review. Ballers: Season 1, Episode 5: Machete Charge TV Show Review Machete Charge involves further consequences of loose ends between friends and family in pair relationships that are essential to some motivation, but that dilemma is heavily weighted on money for all. The main theme of this show is money builds and always has some influence on relationships, or rather, money talks and that’s all we need to hear. Joe (Rob Corddry) has only kept his job because his little marketing trip on the yacht was possibly fruitful.

It is pure coincidence in light of him being such a financial pirate that football players make interesting financial management clients who are warned and then caught up in “blackmail” schemes because they were smoking industrial sized blunts with naked women doing cocaine at a corporate sponsored shin dig on a mega yacht owned by Mr. Anderson (Richard Schiff).  Spence (Dwayne Johnson) becomes the shake down manager after Vernon (Donovan W. Carter) and Reggie (London Brown) have to drop the ball with him in some hot water.

Spence fills the shoes in a custom role for himself when he has to discuss the pictures in the right of first refusal scandal with a mysterious machete enthusiast / attorney for a woman who shot the photos at the party. Market rate for this kind of deal isn’t something Spence or Joe have any experience with. So, they wing it.

Ricky (John David Washington) manages to pull some strings and gets Charles (Omar Benson Miller) and Alonzo (Antoine Harris) to the strip club. He is trying too hard to kiss and make up after his affair with Alonzo’s mother actually didn’t upset Alonzo at all. He manages to pull a prank that is priceless, or maybe worth a shoebox full of money.

Charles, Mr. “I can’t remember the difference between porn and real life”, and wife, Julie (Jazmyn Simon), were doing fine until he gets home from the strip club. They had a scene before he went out that reveals he is caught in some dissonance with fantasy and real life, but as these two get heated up, Charles sets out on a new course. Of all the men on this show, his sex life is going to be the most problematic for him. His judgment is subdued by his perception of women in a “man’s world” where he isn’t the top dog, and after this scandal, we are sure to see more hard hitting ladies coming out of the woodwork. Battling between the sexes is a necessary second theme to this story. Maybe this is old and tired, but the bottom line is wanting more from life, especially sex, is relatable and albeit unlikable, conflict is key.

Money, sex, and drugs in that order coalesce into more rising antagonism and some brilliant payback this week. I still reiterate that this show is nowhere near the comedy genre. Ballers is drama, all drama, with some tragic comic relief mixed in for the glory of mischief behind past and present closed doors, and hopefully in the future, not in front of more cameras. We don’t need these idiots to be redundant or smoking hard drugs that look like other stuff sometimes

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