Bill Murray’s New Ireland Golf Series Is the Perfect Sunday Watch

Bill Murray has spent most of his career looking like he’d rather be somewhere else, and somehow that somewhere else usually turns out to be exactly where the rest of us want to be. This Sunday, that somewhere else is Ireland. The actor’s new six-part documentary series, A Course Called Ireland, lands on Paramount+ on October 25, and it might be the most Bill Murray project imaginable: a road trip built around golf, pubs, old friends, and the kind of conversations that only happen when nobody is in a hurry.

He’s not doing this alone, either. Murray stars alongside bestselling author Tom Coyne, whose book of the same name — A Course Called Ireland: A Long Walk in Search of a Country, a Pint, and the Next Tee — gave the series its shape. The two of them set off across Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, playing some of the country’s most famous courses, meeting locals along the way, and letting the trip wander wherever it wants to wander. If that sounds loose, that’s the point. This isn’t a golf tutorial, and it isn’t a travel brochure with a celebrity pasted on top. It’s two friends on the road, with cameras along for the ride.

And yes, if you’re wondering whether you can just binge the whole thing in an afternoon, you can. All six episodes drop together in the United States, each one running about half an hour, which puts the full run at roughly three hours. That’s a lazy Sunday sorted, frankly. Viewers in the United Kingdom get it through BBC iPlayer and BBC television instead, so nobody has to sit this one out based on postcode.

What the show actually is

Strip away the famous faces and the premise is disarmingly simple. Murray and Coyne travel Ireland course by course, stopping at pubs, small businesses, and local haunts as they go. They talk to people who actually live there. They get rained on, presumably. They laugh a lot, also presumably, because putting Bill Murray in a pub in Ireland and expecting solemn silence would be like putting a cat in a sunbeam and expecting it to file its taxes.

Paramount+ has been clear that the friendships and the unexpected detours matter just as much as the golf itself. That’s a telling detail, because it explains why this series works as television rather than as a sports special. You don’t need to know your wedge from your putter to enjoy watching Murray talk his way through a small town, or to enjoy the sight of a film legend happily playing second fiddle to a local with a better story. Golf is the excuse. Ireland, and the people in it, are the reason to stay.

There’s also something quietly personal running underneath it all. The series is a chance for Murray to reconnect with his Irish roots, and you can feel that thread in the way the trip is framed — not as a celebrity parachuting in for a weekend, but as a slow walk through a place that means something to him. He has form here, too. Back in 2022 he turned up at a celebrity golf tournament in Ireland alongside Jamie Dornan and Niall Horan, looking entirely at home. This new series just stretches that weekend feeling out into a full journey.

How and when to watch

Let’s keep this part dead simple, because streaming releases love to overcomplicate themselves. In the United States, A Course Called Ireland premieres Sunday, October 25, on Paramount+. All six episodes arrive at once, so there’s no weekly wait, no cliffhanger held hostage until next Sunday, and no need to set a reminder you’ll immediately forget. Each episode runs around 30 minutes, which makes it dangerously easy to say “just one more” four times in a row.

That half-hour length is a smart call, honestly. It’s long enough to settle into a place and meet the people there, and short enough that the show never starts to drag. Three hours total is basically a long film, split into chapters you can pause whenever the kettle calls. In the UK, the BBC route means it should be just as easy to find, whether you’re a habitual iPlayer scroller or someone who still watches things at the time they’re actually on.

If you’re the sort of viewer who likes to plan, here’s the plan: clear a Sunday afternoon, make something warm to drink, and don’t expect a high-stakes competition. Nobody’s keeping score in the way that matters here. The score that counts is how many good stories they collect along the way, and on that front, early signs suggest they collected plenty.

Who turns up along the way

A road trip like this lives or dies on its passengers, and Murray and Coyne have rounded up a guest list that jumps happily between sport, comedy, and family. Former Philadelphia Eagles star Jason Kelce is among the famous faces who pop up during the six episodes, which makes sense — Kelce has built a second career out of being the rare ex-athlete who is genuinely funny on camera, and pairing him with Murray sounds like a recipe for at least one scene that goes completely off script.

Then there’s Chris O’Dowd, the Irish actor best known to most viewers from Bridesmaids and The IT Crowd, who brings a home-team advantage to the whole enterprise. Irish comedian and podcast host Joanne McNally joins the fun too, and anyone who knows her work will know she is not the type to sit quietly while Bill Murray holds court. That’s exactly what a show like this needs — people who push back, crack jokes, and keep the energy from turning into a polite sightseeing tour.

Family gets a look-in as well, with Murray’s brothers Joel Murray and John Murray both appearing. Joel is an actor in his own right, and there’s a particular warmth to watching siblings on screen together, especially siblings who have spent decades in and around show business. You get the sense that some of the best moments in this series won’t be the ones anyone planned. They’ll be the throwaway lines between brothers, the kind of thing you can’t script without ruining it.

What ties the guest list together is that none of these people are there to promote something in the usual, stiff way. They’re there to play golf, travel, and spend time together. The show gives viewers a chance to see stars away from their usual work, doing something ordinary — badly, brilliantly, or somewhere in between — and that ordinariness is the charm. Watching Jason Kelce line up a putt is fun precisely because he’s not in a stadium anymore.

Why golf, why Ireland, why now

Here’s the thing about Bill Murray and golf: it isn’t a bit. It isn’t a hobby he picked up for a role and then dropped. He played the groundskeeper Carl Spackler in Caddyshack back in 1980, a performance so quotable that golfers have been repeating his lines on courses for more than forty years, and his love of the game has been a running thread in his public life ever since. He grew up caddying as a teenager in Illinois, so the game is wired into his story in a way that feels real rather than borrowed. When he talks about golf, he sounds like someone who has actually spent long, slightly frustrating afternoons on a course, which is to say, like most golfers.

Ireland, meanwhile, is almost unfairly well suited to this kind of series. The courses are famous, the scenery does half the cinematographer’s job, and the pub culture gives every episode a natural place to land. A round of golf ends, the light changes, someone suggests a drink, and suddenly you’re in the middle of a conversation you’d never get in a studio. That’s the rhythm the show is built on, and it’s a good one. It also explains why the series works even if you couldn’t care less about handicaps: the golf gets them from place to place, but the places are the point.

As for the timing, there’s something appealing about a gentle, funny travel series arriving as the year starts to turn colder and darker. Not every new show needs to be a puzzle box or a prestige drama that demands a spreadsheet to follow. Sometimes you just want to watch a beloved actor walk around a beautiful country with his friends, and that is a perfectly respectable way to spend three hours. In a streaming landscape that often feels like homework, a show that feels like a holiday is a small act of rebellion.

The long game of Bill Murray

It helps, of course, that Murray is Bill Murray. Few actors could carry a series built on wandering and chatting, but he has spent five decades turning that exact energy into a career. He broke out on Saturday Night Live, became a movie star with Stripes and Ghostbusters, and then somehow reinvented himself again as the wry, melancholy heart of films like Groundhog Day and Lost in Translation, the latter earning him an Academy Award nomination and a Golden Globe win. Along the way he became a fixture of Wes Anderson’s films, turning up in everything from Rushmore to The French Dispatch with the air of a man who wandered onto set and decided to stay.

That career is why a series like this lands differently than it would with almost anyone else. Murray has always seemed allergic to the usual celebrity machinery. He famously has no agent in the traditional sense, he turns up at random parties and local events, and he has built a legend out of unplanned encounters with fans. A structured, over-produced travel show would feel wrong for him. A loose road trip through Ireland, where the best moments are probably accidents, feels exactly right.

There’s a lesson in that, if you want one. Longevity in Hollywood usually comes from reinvention, and Murray has reinvented himself more times than most actors get the chance to. Comedy star, blockbuster lead, indie darling, elder statesman who still steals every scene he’s in — he’s done all of it without ever losing the sense that he’s slightly amused by the whole business. Watching him in Ireland, you get the feeling he’s enjoying himself, and that enjoyment is infectious. It’s hard to watch someone have a genuinely good time and not start having one yourself.

So, will A Course Called Ireland change television? No, and it clearly isn’t trying to. Will it make you want to book a flight, or at least dig out your old golf clubs, or at the very least spend a Sunday afternoon smiling at your screen? That seems a lot more likely. Murray and Coyne set out to walk Ireland, play some golf, meet some people, and have a pint or two along the way. The rest of us just get to tag along from the sofa, which, on a cold October Sunday, sounds like a pretty good deal.

Source: Just Jared