Sports is just another form of TV content, and networks and streaming services have eagerly sought to stretch that out over more hours. So it’s hardly a surprise to see the drama spilling off the fields, courts and mats and into docuseries and documentaries, focusing not just on the games people play but the people who play them.
This week, that brings the Amazon documentary “Kelce,” a profile of NFL lineman Jason Kelce; a new season of “Welcome to Wrexham,” the Ryan Reynolds/Rob McElhenney-produced docuseries about the soccer team they bought; and the sports-adjacent “Wrestlers,” which looks at the owners and participants in a small wrestling operation, which mixes acting and athletics, given all those body slams and falls.
They join a host of recent documentaries humanizing well-known sports figures, such as Netflix’s “Quarterback” which followed a trio of signal callers over the course of a season; Apple TV+’s excellent “Stephen Curry: Underrated” about the NBA star; and a docuseries that captures the hunt to make it in big-time basketball, “One Shot: Overtime Elite,” which examines the pressure on youths participating in that relatively new enterprise designed to showcase teens with an eye on making it in the NBA.
For well-known athletes like Kelce the appeal is clear, with the former spending much of the documentary debating when he should retire and what life might look like after football, in the midst of a season that followed the Philadelphia Eagle through his Super Bowl showdown with his brother, Travis, of the Kansas City Chiefs. By contrast, “One Shot” catches its young players at a pivotal moment in their careers, focusing primarily on twins Amen and Ausar Thompson who made history by becoming the first brother tandem selected in the first 10 picks (they went No. 4 and 5, respectively) of the NBA draft.
That hunger for success is also captured somewhat differently in “BS High,” a recent HBO documentary about a bogus high-school football enterprise that garnered attention when it somehow found its way into a televised game on ESPN in 2021, losing in such spectacular fashion to football powerhouse IMG Academy as to prompt an investigation into what Bishop Sycamore High really was and how this happened.
Although the scripted-programming spigot hasn’t dried up yet, with the writers and actors strikes dragging on, don’t be surprised if there’s more sports-related programming.
