Joe Namath

Christian Laettner

Vince Lombardi

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Fill 1
August 24, 2015
In The Mix

More Than a Game

Sports docs score big amid the surge of true-drama programming.

Craig Tomashoff

It’s not exactly a secret that reality television doesn’t offer much that is real.

Which may explain, in part, why viewers craving true drama are increasingly turning to sports documentaries — and producers are striving to satisfy them.

“What people have discovered,” says Stephen Espinoza, executive vice-president of Showtime Sports, “is that the world of sports is extremely fertile in stories that, in many cases, are better than fiction. That’s what resonates with audiences — they depict real-life drama, not something contrived or artificial.”

“Sports makes for authentic TV,” adds Epix CEO Mark Greenberg, whose network profiles celebrity athletes in its docu-series In the Moment.

While Showtime has won raves for series like All Access and movies like Kobe Bryant’s Muse, HBO continues to add to its award-winning sports programming history with docs from Namath to Lombardi.

ESPN, meanwhile, has been enhancing its reputation for more than a decade with serious filmmaking, like its Emmy-winning series 30 for 30. Adding to the mix is a new unit at NBC that will create sports docs for airing across the company’s multiple platforms.

“We have big followings for our sports properties like the NHL and NASCAR,” acknowledges Mark Levy, senior vice-president for original productions and creative at the NBC Sports Group. “We want to serve that core audience in the short term with games and races. But in the long term, we want a brand that will also reach out to the more typical sports fan.“

In this new sports arena, the strategy is not simply to reach hardcore fans who can quote standings and stats. It’s about telling “stories about athletes and coaches in a much deeper way,” says Dan Fleschner, director of editorial content for NBC’s Sports Group, “pulling back the curtain on what their lives are like beyond wins and losses. There’s a much deeper audience for that.”

Unlike a game or match — gone and done as soon as the final shot is taken — a sports documentary can live on. That was certainly the case for the 30 for 30 episode “I Hate Christian Laettner,” which ultimately attracted 17 million viewers.

John Dahl, vice-president at ESPN Films, attributes much of the massive interest in the film (which told how fans came to revile the former Duke University basketball star) to its exemplary illustration of ESPN’s core principle: “You have to appeal to the audience on an emotional level, with stories about people that are set in sports but are really cultural stories.

"The Laettner film touched on larger themes like hate in the lives of fans. That’s something everyone has an interest in.”

The documentary tradition at HBO Sports goes back further than any other network, to the early ‘90s and films like the three-part baseball-themed When It Was a Game.

“There was not a huge demand for this at the time,” admits Rick Bernstein, senior vice-president of HBO Sports. “When It Was a Game was the first to take a true documentary approach — that people would be more interested in the story behind the story, rather than who won and lost. This network would allow whatever time we needed to tell a story with a journalistic, intelligent approach.”

Ironically, as sports docs become more popular, their playing field is becoming a lot like the games themselves.

“There is a lot of competition out there now,” notes ESPN’s Dahl, “far more than when we started doing documentaries with SportsCentury, the [1999] series that really started this for us. And it’s great, because it keeps us as hungry now as we were in the earliest days of the network.”

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