Bill Murray has been making golf look ridiculous since 1980, when he played Carl Spackler, the deranged groundskeeper in Caddyshack who treated a gopher infestation like a matter of national security.
Forty-six years later, Murray returns to the golf course. The gopher is gone, the scenery has improved considerably, and the former groundskeeper has apparently developed a new enemy — the television production schedule.
His new series, A Course Called Ireland, premieres Sunday, October 25, on Paramount+. The show follows Murray and travel writer Tom Coyne across Ireland as they visit legendary golf courses, explore local communities, and occasionally remember they’re supposed to be making a television program.
Murray’s brothers and a rotating cast of familiar faces join the trip, including former Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce, comedian Chris O’Dowd, and Irish comedian Joanne McNally.
But if you’re expecting six episodes of celebrities discussing their handicaps while admiring expensive fairways, Murray has other plans.
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Bill Murray Has Never Been Much for Following the Rules
The series draws on Coyne’s bestselling travel memoir, A Course Called Ireland: A Long Walk in Search of a Country, a Pint, and the Next Tee, which chronicled his 1,100-mile journey around Ireland in search of the ultimate golf experience.
For the television adaptation, Coyne traded some of that walking for cars, castles and the unpredictable company of one of Hollywood’s most famously eccentric personalities.
According to The Guardian, Murray repeatedly challenges the production’s carefully arranged activities, sometimes abandoning the itinerary altogether.
During one sequence, he refuses to visit a scheduled pub, wanders off to hear folk music, and later returns for an impromptu singalong after filming stops.
In other words, the production apparently discovered that the best way to capture a spontaneous Bill Murray moment is to stop trying to schedule one.
It’s a particularly funny predicament for a television crew. The man they’re following has spent decades becoming famous for doing unexpected things, and now they’re trying to get him to do those things on command.
Good luck with that.
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The Real Stars Aren’t Necessarily the Celebrities
In an October 23 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Murray and Coyne said their ambitions went well beyond making another celebrity travel show.
“We wanted Ireland and Irish voices to be right at the front,” Coyne said.
That philosophy extends to the show’s storytelling, with Irish residents helping narrate episodes and ordinary encounters becoming central to the experience.
Coyne also described the need to account for what he calls “Murray time,” the inevitable delays that occur when his traveling companion becomes fascinated by someone or something along the way. Right on cue, during the interview, Murray interrupted the conversation to investigate a classic car parked on a Boston street.
The man was supposed to be promoting a television show about Ireland. Instead, he was admiring somebody’s automobile.
Which, come to think of it, might be the most convincing advertisement for the show imaginable. There is something appealing about a travel series that lets a destination interrupt the celebrities rather than forcing them to accommodate it.
Ireland’s golf courses are certainly part of the attraction, but the pubs, conversations and people encountered between rounds appear to be where the show finds its personality.
And Murray, who has spent much of his career turning interruptions into entertainment, seems particularly well suited to that kind of journey. And for anyone who still remembers Murray’s war against a plastic, explosive-resistant gopher in Caddyshack, it’s a pleasure to watch him return to golf without worrying about the greens.
All six episodes of A Course Called Ireland are now streaming on Paramount+.
