Running Point: Mindy Kaling, Kate Hudson, and the Workplace Comedy Still Works

Netflix released Running Point in February 2025 across ten episodes. Mindy Kaling and Ike Barinholtz created the show, loosely based on the professional life of Jeanie Buss, the Los Angeles Lakers owner who took over the franchise from her father; Kaling and David Stassen were the writers’ room leads. Kate Hudson stars as Isla Gordon, a party-girl heiress to the family basketball franchise who is unexpectedly promoted to president when her older brother steps down.

The show did well commercially, better than Netflix had projected; Kaling and Barinholtz produced a second season almost immediately. Five months on, with the second season announced, the first season has clarified as a show whose strongest asset is Hudson’s return to regular screen work, and whose weakness is that the show itself is not quite ambitious enough to match what she is doing.

What Kate Hudson has

Kate Hudson has been away from weekly television for her whole career until now. She has done features, intermittently, at a declining rate since the mid-2010s, and the features have mostly not served her. Running Point is the first project since perhaps Almost Famous that handed her a role specifically calibrated to her strengths. The calibration is the show’s single best decision.

What Hudson has, as an actor, is a specific American-female register that is increasingly uncommon in contemporary screen acting: a combination of physical confidence, verbal quickness, and a specific willingness to play her characters’ moments of social discomfort without cutting them short for protection. Isla Gordon is a part designed to use all three. She is a woman whose assumed frivolousness is both real (she has partied her way through her thirties) and strategic (the frivolousness has been a way of surviving the family). Hudson plays both registers simultaneously, and the simultaneity is the character.

The scene that makes the case for Hudson is in episode two. Isla is giving her first press conference as team president. She is manifestly not prepared. The press conference is being held in the team’s practice facility. Hudson plays the whole five-minute scene as a woman who is deploying, in real time, a lifetime of strategic-likability training that has not prepared her for the specific kind of authority the press conference requires. She covers. She recovers. She occasionally lands. The reporters are sceptical. Hudson is playing a person specifically learning, on camera, that the register she has survived in is no longer sufficient for the room she is now in.

The ensemble, adequate

The supporting cast is functional. Drew Tarver plays Isla’s acting-out younger brother Sandy. Scott MacArthur plays her strait-laced older brother Ness, a former team player now in management. Brenda Song plays the team’s new coach. Fabrizio Guido plays the team’s star. The performances are all competent, and a couple are better than that. Tarver, whose work on The Other Two was one of the best supporting comic performances of recent years, does the same specific character here, a man who keeps the audience’s sympathy despite being deeply unserious.

The ensemble’s weakness is that the writers’ room has not given each supporting character a fully developed arc. The show is structured around Isla’s learning curve, which is the right central organising move, but the supporting characters are not developed enough to sustain the ten-episode length. By episode seven, some of the subplots feel like filler. This is a common streaming-comedy problem, and Running Point does not solve it.

The workplace, specifically

Where the show is strongest is in its treatment of the professional-basketball workplace. Kaling and Barinholtz have done their research. The specific roles that populate an NBA front office (a general manager, assistant GMs, a head of scouting, analytics people, media relations) are given specific screen time. The show knows what a coach’s day looks like, what a trade deadline does to a front office, what the relationship between owners and players looks like at the specific level of contract negotiation.

This is the kind of work that workplace comedy has traditionally done well when it does anything at all. Parks and Recreation understood municipal government. 30 Rock understood television production. Running Point understands professional basketball operations. The understanding is the show’s most durable asset.

There is a sequence in episode four, running about fifteen minutes across the middle of the episode, in which Isla has to conduct an NBA trade-deadline negotiation for the first time. The sequence is staged with the specific procedural discipline that the show’s best workplace-comedy forebears brought to their own procedural material. Hudson is in over her head. Her GM (played by Max Greenfield) is trying to coach her through the specific technical mechanics of a trade while maintaining his own professional dignity. The scene is funny, accurate, and emotionally honest. It is what the show is for.

Where the show is less ambitious than it should be

The show’s central structural weakness is that it does not push its specific premise (a woman inheriting a professional-sports franchise in a field historically hostile to women) as hard as the premise can be pushed. The sexism Isla encounters is referenced, staged occasionally, and generally treated with the specific comic lightness that the show has established as its overall register. The treatment is fine. It is also, measured against what the show could do, underpowered.

Running Point is not Ted Lasso. It is not trying to be. But the show has a specific opportunity to be a workplace comedy that genuinely engages with the specific politics of women in senior sports-business roles, and the show is cautious about that opportunity. The caution reads, by episode eight, as a missed chance.

Kaling’s previous work (The Mindy Project, Never Have I Ever, The Sex Lives of College Girls) has been, consistently, interested in the specific experience of women of colour navigating white professional institutions. Running Point, with a white lead, is working in a different register. The register is valid. It is also less personally-urgent Kaling writing than her best work has been. The show sometimes feels like professional work rather than like the work the writer specifically wanted to do.

Direction and craft

The show was directed by a rotating team including Tristram Shapeero, Ken Whittingham, and Adeel Akhtar. The direction is functional rather than distinctive. This is not a show where specific directors are doing distinctive work. It is a showrunner-driven comedy in the Kaling tradition, and the directors are executing the house style.

The practical basketball sequences, when the show stages game action, are handled adequately. Nobody is going to confuse Running Point with a sports show. The basketball is backdrop. The workplace is foreground.

What the season leaves

Running Point is a pleasant, professionally-made workplace comedy that does specific things well and does not stretch. The specific thing it does best is hand Kate Hudson a part she can use, and the casting is the season’s most significant achievement for the medium at large, because Hudson, as a regular-TV actor, is an asset the medium has not had access to before.

The second season has an opportunity to push where the first season declined to push. I am modestly hopeful. The infrastructure is there. Kaling and Barinholtz are capable of the more ambitious version of the show. The question is whether they make it.

Watch episodes two, four, and six. Pay attention to Hudson’s specific delivery of press-conference dialogue. She is doing character work that is more sophisticated than the show’s comedic register always acknowledges.