Critic’s Notebook: Why Sports Docs Are Some of the Best Dramas on TV

Beginning on July 24, the Paris Olympics will measure athletic greatness in finite windows of time.

Noah Lyles will run 100 meters in comfortably under 10 seconds. It will take a bit longer — more than 15 minutes — for Katie Ledecky to swim 1,500 meters. French baller Victor Wembanyama will attempt to burnish his growing legend in 40-minute increments.

The NBCU family will, once again, trot out the usual assortment of retired jocks, veteran journalists and Snoop Dogg to offer the reminder that a sport isn’t just the game itself, but all of the storytelling that comes with it. Sports is entertainment, and in 2024, entertainment means television. This won’t surprise any small-screen obsessive; lately, “television” and “sports” have become frequently interchangeable terms.

The primary explanation for that is simple: In a world of delayed viewing, live events are the Holy Grail for everybody. It’s the reason that last year’s list of “most watched TV programs” consisted of the Super Bowl and a bunch of NFL telecasts. It’s the reason that the latest NBA rights deal is valued at $76 billion. It’s also the reason that there’s such joy at the ripple effect of Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese turning the WNBA into an emerging ratings juggernaut.

Netflix, which resisted the lure of “live” for most of its existence, has been pushing aggressively into this space, going from comedy specials and ill-fated reality finales to the exhausting hybrid that was the Tom Brady roast. Come December, people will get to pause their Christmas rituals — which already included the NBA — for live football on Netflix.

Of course, Netflix has been training its audience to view the service as an athletics hub for years, carving out a home for my two favorite sports documentary franchises — or at the very least, my two favorite sports documentary formulas.

Greg Whiteley’s One Potato Productions banner broke onto the field in 2016 with Last Chance U, looking at the coaches and players on the East Mississippi Community College football team. Over eight years, the successful template — troubled but introspective athletes grasping for what may be their, well, “last chance”; bombastic-but-loving coaches; the impeccably shot Big Game at the climax of every episode — has evolved to make room for basketball (Last Chance U: Basketball), competitive cheerleading (Cheer), professional sports cheerleading (America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders) and, in the perfect intersection of sport and entertainment, wrestling (Wrestlers). To watch a One Potato Show is to be guaranteed terrifying intensity, unexpected laughter and tightly composed character portraits.

At this point, Whiteley and his team’s biggest and most prolific competition is Box to Box Films, the company that broke through in 2019 with Formula 1: Drive to Survive before branching out into golf (Full Swing), tennis (Break Point) and track and field (the recent Sprint). Though One Potato is probably better at storytelling, the Box to Box docs have a visual intimacy capable of redefining how we perceive those sports. And their casting is remarkable: The featured subjects tend to be up-and-coming athletes, and if you didn’t necessarily care previously but you want to make sure you have a rooting interest when the Olympics come around, Sprint will give you a dozen people to cheer for.

Neither franchise would exist without HBO’s venerable Hard Knocks, which started in 2001 as a preseason-only peek into one NFL locker room per season. Since the audience appetite proved insatiable, HBO and the NFL began doing two and now three installments each year.

It’s easier to construct a franchise when you know people have a built-in investment, which is part of why my favorite sports show now on television is FX’s Welcome to Wrexham. Love them or hate them, getting audiences to care about the Dallas Cowboys is a breeze. But turning a fifth-tier Welsh soccer team into a global phenomenon is a bigger achievement, so kudos to Wrexham A.F.C. owners and series executive producers Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.

Welcome to Wrexham has, in three seasons, built a deep emotional bond between viewers and Wrexham as both a team and a blue-collar city. The show also has continued to expand its storytelling reach. Dedicating extended arcs to the Wrexham women’s team, traveling to the Welsh expat community in Patagonia and using its platform to introduce us to the very personal struggles and triumphs of the local fan base, Welcome to Wrexham has become TV’s most reliable and deserving tearjerker. No series now airing does a better job of exploring male fragility and vulnerability, or has done more to celebrate homosocial bonding and intimacy. People on Welcome to Wrexham just love one another, and they love telling one another they love one another, and Wrexham A.F.C. will be doing its second American tour this year to celebrate that love. (Let’s just keep Paul Mullin healthy, OK?)

Reality, it turns out, is easier than taking sports into the scripted realm. Ted Lasso aside, recent schedules are littered with short-lived sports-themed shows that generated interest but not necessarily ratings. You can still make fans sad and angry if you mention Fox’s Pitch or, more recently, Amazon’s A League of Their Own. HBO’s Winning Time was fun and stirred up a little controversy among people unwilling to accept dramatic license but only lasted two seasons. FX’s recent Clipped took a complicated and often pragmatic approach to the seemingly tawdry saga of the Clippers, Donald Sterling and V. Stiviano, but if there was any passionate buzz around this exploration of scandal and the intersection of race and wealth in sports, I missed it.

Astute readers will already be wondering how I made it this far into a column on “sports TV” without mentioning ESPN, which has represented the genre’s vanguard for decades. Thanks to the 30 for 30 documentary series, the network ascended to even greater heights in 2016, when Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America was the year’s defining piece of programming of any type.

The series is still churning out documentaries, including five this summer. The impact, however, has lessened. Entries like False Positive and the esports-centric No Scope: The Story of FaZe Clan are fine, but more and more, even the worthiest of topics feels questionably focused — either rushed or perplexingly padded.

ESPN’s marquee documentary franchise has become Gotham Chopra’s In the Arena series, which started with a career-spanning look at Brady and is now giving the same treatment to Serena Williams. The Arena shows are almost the antithesis of the 30 for 30 docs (which traditionally focus on more under-the-radar subjects, O.J. excepted), putting a spotlight on athletes who have already very much lived their life in the public glare. They’re not journalism or explorative filmmaking; they’re (auto)biographies or glorified commercials. That doesn’t mean they can’t also be intoxicating glimpses into the real personality of previously opaque legends; it just means that those glimpses are only what the stars want us to see. The hagiography of the Arena brand doesn’t always fit in with the rest of ESPN’s programming, which is an ungainly mix of live sports, commercials for sports gambling and news reports on the damaging impact of sports gambling on live sports.

The dominant vein of sports storytelling right now is decidedly nostalgic and backward-looking; if you’re a baseball legend or an NBA titan and you haven’t had your own documentary, call your agent. That said, it’s interesting that the recent shows to offer the most insight into sports today may be Peacock’s not-very-good gladiatorial drama Those About to Die and HBO’s very solid four-hour Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose, which capture the uncomfortable collision of competition, fandom and gambling.

Nobody has more resources in the sports sphere than ESPN, and it would just take commitment and clarity to return 30 for 30 to its place at the genre pinnacle. Heaven knows there are still plenty of undertold stories waiting for the exposure. Folks looking for ideas would be wise to keep a close watch on Paris and Peacock.

This story first appeared in the July 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.