Patrick Freyne: Despite the solid presence of The Rock, HBO’s new “comedy” Ballers stomps across very shaky ground

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson or, if you’re a purist, The “Dwayne Johnson” Rock, is an interesting fellow. He looks like an Easter Island head on top of an upside down triangle and he is very good at glowering post-ironically and sleevelessly from action-movie posters.

He is a charismatic presence, perfectly capable of stealing attention away from an explosion or a space monster, partly because he’s genuinely likeable and partly because he is very wide. Sometimes I suspect he isn’t actually an upside-down triangle at all, but is three or four men tied together with a belt or possible just one man whose aspect ratio is set wrong or some sort of fancy bit of farm machinery.

In Ballers (Tuesday, Sky Atlantic) "The" (The Rock's friends call him by his first name) finds himself wearing a suit, which is instantly disconcerting – a little bit like seeing a rhombus or a filing-cabinet in formal wear – and he shares screen time, not with an explosion or a car chase or a CGI scorpion, but with former Daily Show correspondent Rob Corddry, who specialises in playing sleazy loudmouths and does not break type here.

Corrdry plays sidekick to The Rock’s alliterative ex-football player-turned-financial-manager Spencer Strasmore. Their job is to make spoiled American football players richer by talking loudly into mobile phones while wearing sunglasses (you can do modules on this at the Smurfit Business School) and hosting parties on yachts. “Right now, my dreams are all about deals and dollars,” boasts The Rock, with a haunted look that suggests that he’s spent the night being chased by a giant bank note through an Aldi.

These football players do not need to be richer really, but Ballers comes from the minds of Mark "Marky Mark" Wahlberg and Stephen "Stevey Steve" Levinson, who created the post-realist wish-fulfilment brodeo Entourage. So it really may as well be titled "The Crisis of Masculinity Part II".

Both shows act like soothing crib-mobiles for tired and emotional men of the post-industrial era (the eponymous "bawlers"?) and are essentially designed to lull them to sleep and stop them from crying with distracting tales of wealth and pleasure ("Look – a yacht! Look – some scantily-clad dancing ladies! Look – it's The Rock!"). It's a vicarious, metaphorical opportunity to grow from an acorn into an oak, like Adrian Mole's dad watching Playschool.

Fist bump and haze

The actual "ballers" of the title are gold-chain-enhanced, muscular jocks who fist bump and haze one another for sleeping with each other's mothers (a subplot) or dropping the n-word (Corddry, of course). They also like to snort cocaine off other people's breasts when the opportunity arises. And no, I'm not referring to The Rock's breasts, impressive as these are, for there are also women on Ballers, and HBO is damned if they're all going to have clothes on.

Here are all of the types of women that exist on Ballers so far: 1. The type of woman who is a good wife (there are two of these women on Ballers). 2. The type of woman who spontaneously takes her top off while dancing on a boat (there is a yacht full of these women on Ballers). 3. The type of woman who rings a stranger she met at a party to make orgasmic noises (there is one of these women on Ballers).

Ballers is casually, unthinkingly sexist and not hugely funny. It's part of a new wave of cable comedies that achieves the "comedy" designation simply by not being drama, rather than by making anyone laugh. There are some hints that, unlike Entourage, the writers plan to develop darker themes over the course of the series (about post-stardom ennui and football-related neurological disorders, for instance).

But don’t worry if that sounds too challenging. There are other indications that we’re just in for episode-after-episode of bulgy shouty men high-fiving one another while women in bikinis dance. If so, The Rock is just a slightly more fantastical looking Barney the Dinosaur, magically transporting sad, confused bros to a consequence-free, homosocial, imagination land of breasts and bling.

God help us all.

Plot , brood, lust and bicker

On Vikings this week (Monday, RTE2) a blind man in a cave channelled 10 years' worth of ESRI reports: "I see a harvest celebrated in blood! I see a trickster whose weapon cleaves ore! I see a city made of marble and a burning, broiling ocean!"

I know! That does sound like another Fine Gael/Labour coalition but it’s a pretty vague answer to the question that was actually asked: “Will I ever bear another child?”

This came from Lagartha, one of several strong female characters that can be found in Dark Ages Scandinavia but not, apparently, in contemporary, football-throwing USA.

She’s also one of several characters trying to drag her tribe into the eighth century with new-fangled farming ideas, educational cultural exchanges and crazy new-age religions (Christianity).

In this episode, they all float over to England led by their authoritively mulleted, leather- britches-clad new king, Fish from Marillion, I mean Ragnar, in order to help an Anglo-Saxon ally, King Ecbert, destroy his enemies and thus demonstrate the inherent superiority of the Scandinavian social model.

Vikings doesn't always have particularly complex plotlines but it's still an entertainingly plausible depiction of people swept up in historical processes. Characters plot and brood and lust and bicker and fret. Like in Ballers, business decisions are made on a boat, but that's where the similarities begin and end. And people get chopped up a bit in battle, which, let's face it, is always fun.