After 'The Last Dance': Where sports documentaries have gone wrong

Sports doc filmmakers have spent the last three years chasing the success of the 2020 Michael Jordan series. They’re going about it all wrong.

Image: ESPN

The Last Dance, ESPN and Netflix’s documentary about Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls dynasty of the 1990s was a vast phenomenon back in 2020, and its success, like most things in entertainment, led to numerous copycats. 

The Jordan documentary led a series of announcements by a seeming who’s-who of all-time great athletes, that they too would soon be stars of hours-long career-spanning documentaries. Even athletes – like Derek Jeter and Tom Brady — who had 20-year careers but were never especially known for saying anything interesting. There were also separate multi-part series about the history of the Los Angeles Lakers and two of their biggest stars (Shaquille O’Neal and Magic Johnson) with similar ones on the way about the Dallas Cowboys, LeBron James, and many others… 

There are reasons to suspect, however, that the sports doc boom is starting to bust. 

The Ankler columnist known as Entertainment Strategy Guy wrote back in August that not many people are watching the recent sports docs, which these days are almost entirely on streaming services. Even Formula 1: Drive to Survive, the Netflix series about the European auto racing series that was such a phenomenon it inspired copycats of its own, has crashed in the ratings in its most recent seasons. Only Quarterback, the recent Netflix series about NFL passers Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins, and Marcus Mariota, has really broken through of late. 

It turns out there were a lot of things about The Last Dance that were very much unique to that circumstance. First off, It was an in-depth examination of an important team of the past, with just the amount of distance from the events in question. 

The Last Dance, unlike most of the big sports docs that followed, happened to be sitting on a huge cache of never-before-seen footage and actually offered some new revelations. And while The Last Dance was ten hours long, it earned that ten hours, and absolutely had enough material to fill it. It never felt like a stretch. t

While it was produced, in part, by Michael Jordan’s production outfit and was undoubtedly his side of the story, The Last Dance also included the voices of every major living figure in the story- and perhaps more importantly, it had no reluctance about making Jordan look like a huge asshole. 

The Last Dance also invented filmmaking techniques — especially that trick when the interview subject is handed an iPad and asked to react on camera — that have been used in countless films since. And of course, The Last Dance came out during the lockdown phase of the pandemic, when no one could leave their house and, besides, there were no other sports to watch. 

Most of the other recent sports documentaries haven’t had most (or any) of that going for them. 

Many of them are produced by the subject’s own production companies, with a tendency to avoid controversial subjects. The words “Aaron Hernandez” are not spoken in any of the 10 hours of The Man in the Arena, the Brady doc, while The Redeem Team (from executive producers Dwyane Wade and LeBron James) went to almost comical lengths to establish why Kobe Bryant had a bad reputation heading into 2008 without mentioning the rape case. 

The recent Apple doc about Steph Curry didn’t see it fit to mention that Curry’s parents got divorced during the filming, even though both parents were featured heavily. Even the fine recent doc about Yogi Berra, It Ain’t Over, had lots of examples of Berra’s survivors seeking to settle scores. 

These films tend not to reveal much that’s new, nor is there always much distance. When The Man in the Arena aired, Brady hadn’t even retired yet. 

Quarterback is fine, I guess, though I’ve had trouble finishing it. I like Welcome to Wrexham. But its first season absolutely did not need to be 18 episodes long. Eight would have been enough.  

Then there’s Untold, the Netflix series that explores controversial sports stories from the recent past. There have been three seasons so far, and each has had about one good episode. Its treatment of “The Malice at the Palace” and the Tim Donaghy scandal didn’t break much new ground, and its Johnny Manziel episode was lazier than anything else. The one real masterpiece was one that had nothing to do with elite athletes- its exploration of the mobbed-up hockey team known as the Danbury Trashers (soon to get a feature adaption from the director of Cha Cha Real Smooth.)

Who is doing sports documentaries right? HBO’s recent BS High did a great job blowing the lid off the “fake high school” Bishop Sycamore, and I was also partial to Kelce, Prime Video’s recent treatment of the Eagles’ Jason Kelce, which never felt like a commercial for its subject. The Saint of Second Chances, about Mike Veeck, was about a unique circumstance (and a very unique man.) The League took a thought-provoking look at the history of the Negro Leagues, while Apple’s recent Super League: The War for Football took a brief incident from history, when European soccer clubs tried to break away and form their own league, and told the hell out of it. 

Then there’s Dorktown. Jon Bois and his partners, who made wild projects like 17776 and Tim Tebow CFL Chronicles back when they were worked at SB Nation, have established a uniquely presented series of hours-long documentaries about sports franchises, most recently The History of the Minnesota Vikings. It got to the essence of that oft-starcrossed franchise, even without the benefit of much game footage or NFL cooperation.

A lot of these documentaries, even the ones I didn’t like that much, have had various degrees of entertainment value. But give me the ones actually doing something new or interesting.