What’s the Future of the Sports Doc Series? An ESPN Veteran Weighs In

Does the sports anthology documentary series have a future? ESPN revolutionized the format in 2009 with the launch of 30 for 30. Originally planned as 30 documentaries connected to the channel’s 30th anniversary, it has since become a documentary franchise in and of itself. Connor Schell helped create that franchise for ESPN alongside Bill Simmons. Now running his own company, Words + Pictures (it is part of Peter Chernin’s The North Road Company), Schell is trying to rethink the sports anthology with Game 7, which debuted on Prime Video Oct. 22.

The series takes a close look at famous and infamous game 7 matchups, where the stakes are at their very highest. The Hollywood Reporter caught up with Schell to discuss the series, and the future of the sports doc.

Let’s talk about Game 7, can you give me some sense of where the idea for the series came from?

The idea came from a meeting I had a couple years ago with the sort of unlikeliest of pairs, [actor] Danny DeVito and [NHL legend] Mark Messier, who had connected, and we started to talk about just the concept of game seven broadly, and how when you just hear the words, it sets you in a time and a place, and you immediately understand the stakes. Sometimes the best ideas are just sitting there, staring you right in the face, and they’re sometimes almost too obvious to recognize.

And as we started to talk about that, and then talk about these kind of epic moments that just hearing the words elicits in your mind as a sports fan, I just thought that’s a great dynamic for an anthology series. It’s obviously a great title that just immediately evokes, as I said, the stakes of the moment, and it reinvents itself every year. There’s great game sevens constantly. That was the origin and we started to put it together, started to figure out what stories we wanted to tell, found a great partner in Amazon, and then spent the last year making these five episodes.

To kind of return to the idea of the anthology series for a second: Despite the the boom in sports docs that we’ve seen, it does seem like there really aren’t the same types of anthologies that we used to have, that are still out there, but that used to be a little more prevalent. There are more one-off docs. Having a franchise, seems to me like it’s a good thing, it can be sustainable in a way that a one off just can’t be.

I think that’s exactly right. I mean, look, the content marketplace broadly is really crowded. And then the sports content marketplace is really crowded as well. So I think the idea of an anthology and an umbrella brand that can continually be refilled with great stories, it helps you stand out. It allows you to create as long as you can continue to tell great stories within it. It allows you to move an audience from one story to the next one. So that’s why I’m particularly excited about this, because I think it’s a concept that can work and be a success.

To return to this idea of the current moment of sports docs, there is still this boom in sports documentaries, but it’s an interesting mix of journalistically-driven stories or investigative stories and access driven stories and some combination thereof. Can you give me a sense of your read of the room right now, in terms of the overall market for sports docs? Is it still strong? And do you think that it’s sustainable? How many stories or access stories are still available?

I think the state of that market is really healthy, and we could talk about a lot of different reasons why. I think sports, to me, still represents the most predominant form of American culture. And it’s the last great convening place where everyone can come together and root for something, and so when you tell a great sports story, it taps into these already existing pockets of passion, where there are built in audiences. There’s levels of both nostalgia and discovery when you do it really well it’s a genre that I believe really, really works when well-executed and I think that’s because sports has such a thriving and consistent and even growing audience in the media landscape that exists today.

When I started doing this 20 years ago, and we started thinking about telling sports stories in documentary form at ESPN, the question was, how many of these can we do? I think along the way, not too long after we started, we realized ‘oh, there’s great stories happening in front of us constantly.’ The sports world keeps renewing itself. I think, to your point, it just changes. Can you continue to find new ways to new formats, new ways to engage audiences, new angles to tell stories and keep evolving? But I don’t think the genre is going anywhere anytime soon.

I will say the fact that every streaming service and TV network is investing in live sports rights, suggests to me that they’re going to want sports adjacent content alongside those.

Exactly, you bring people in for the live window, and then fans want more. They want to hyper engage with their favorite athletes, with their favorite teams, their favorite sports broadly. I think there’s a good appetite for really good storytelling in the genre. It’s just incumbent upon producers, directors, the people at the buyers that are commissioning it to do a really good job, because these things burn out when the stuff that’s made people don’t want to watch.

Another theme that I’ve been covering is the larger content pullback across streaming and TV. But as you said, sports and sports docs are seemingly immune from that, or if not immune, they’re at least less susceptible than other types of content.

I think that’s right.

So can you discuss the access portion of this? Because a lot of athletes are getting into production themselves, and for a lot of these stories there might be some you can only tell with with access and participation from an athlete. There’s others where you don’t necessarily need that access. But how important is it to have access to the principals involved, versus approaching it as an outsider, just trying to tell the best story?

I think it totally depends on what it is you’re making. With Game 7, what was so cool about this series was Aaron Boone, Dirk Nowitzki, Mark Messier, these are guys who have succeeded at the highest level, who were so excited to tell the story of these moments, and they all wanted to do it. I’m not sure we could have done this show without really healthy participation from the participants. I think there’s obviously a whole boom in access content, behind the scenes with various teams or leagues, I think those projects hinge on participation.

I think when you’re doing different historical work you have to be really careful with how you construct it. What’s the story you’re telling? Making sure that whatever you do is authentic and has integrity. I am really, really diligent about making sure, up front, that the project is set up in the right way to succeed, and that the story we’re telling will be uncompromised.