Bill Murray spends six half-hour episodes chasing pars, pints and old friends around the island of Ireland in A Course Called Ireland, a documentary series now streaming in full on Paramount+. All six episodes dropped on October 25, 2026, and the streamer’s own pitch for the show calls it “a celebration of life going gloriously off course.”
Murray is not traveling alone. His playing partner is Tom Coyne, the American golf writer whose 2009 book gave the series its name, and the guest list mixes comedy, sport and family: actor Chris O’Dowd, comedian Joanne McNally, former Philadelphia Eagles center Jason Kelce, and Murray relatives Joel Murray and John Murray all turn up along the route, which runs through both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
The book behind the road trip
Coyne’s original project was far less comfortable than a TV shoot. For A Course Called Ireland, published by Gotham Books on February 19, 2009, he walked the entire coastline of the Republic and Northern Ireland with no cars, buses or trains, stopping to play every links course he passed. The tally was 36 courses and 648 holes, with more than 2,000,000 yards of golf along the way.
That number is worth translating. Two million yards works out to roughly 1,136 miles of fairway and rough, on Badiyaa’s arithmetic (2,000,000 divided by 1,760 yards per mile), before a single step of walking between clubs is counted. Spread over 36 courses, it means each round averaged a full 18 holes.
Coyne went on to repeat the formula twice, with A Course Called Scotland in 2019 and A Course Called America in 2021. He teaches English at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and became editor of the quarterly The Golfer’s Journal in January 2024. Paramount+ is careful to say the series is inspired by his first book rather than a straight adaptation of it, and the show itself insists it is about neither golf nor Murray but about “us,” the people met along the way.
Who made it
The series comes from Skydance Sports and Stellify Media, made in association with the BBC, which carries it for viewers in the UK. Casey Scharf and Morgan Roberts are the showrunners and executive producers, and Chris Cottam is credited as director. Paramount+ released the trailer and key art on October 8, three weeks after first-look photos went out on September 17.
The format suits Murray’s public persona, which has long leaned on unplanned encounters. Readers may remember our story about him pouring Guinness behind the bar at a Yonkers Irish pub on Halloween weekend, which reads almost like a deleted scene from this series. His old Ghostbusters partner has a strange family story of his own, covered in our piece on Dan Aykroyd’s great-grandfather hosting séances in Ontario.
Murray’s golf habit is no act. He has played in the celebrity field at California’s Pebble Beach Pro-Am, as he did in 2016, and the series leans on that habit: the streamer frames the trip as golf, travel, friendship and Irish culture in roughly equal measure, with the unscripted moments between rounds treated as the main event.
Running time for the whole series is about three hours, six episodes of roughly 30 minutes each, and every one of them is available on demand on Paramount+ now.
Further reading
Image: Presidio of Monterey, Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
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