The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have commissioned a 10-part docuseries on themselves and Amazon Prime has agreed to air it, starting on December 11. Even by the debased standards that apply to vanity sports documentaries, the question of "why" springs immediately to mind, and then it just keeps springing there, with a manic gleam in its eye and a knife between its teeth. But "no, and not even if the alternative was coal mining" is too easy a response.
Normally the question of "why" would be a rhetorical for a documentary. Every misbegotten feature film is made for the same reason, which is to see if there's some money to be made off of it, but a documentary film would ordinarily serve to document some notable or useful thing. But sports documentaries are by and large a vanity buy, now, and a sprawling history of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as a subject lands somewhere near "the comprehensive history of Andorra" as these things go—a very niche buy indeed, which is maybe giving it way too much credit and not nearly enough spittle.
But let's be honest: does this suck any more than any other 10-part sports autobiography? Is there a team or person out there who could tell you about themselves for 10 earth hours without you either leaving, punching them in the throat, or doing both those things while also setting fire to the building? No. The word "auto" is the tipoff, here. This particular subgenre of sports documentaries is, invariably, "I By Me, Parts 1 Through 338," and anything you take from it is not their fault but yours. Because you've been warned, five years ago, and repeatedly since then. Michael Jordan told you so with The Last Dance, and who disputes anything Michael Jordan does? Well, other than the Charlotte Hornets, that is?
Jordan was the casting director and star of The Last Dance, an imperfect series that was a perfect time-killer for its moment, which if you've forgotten was "the height of a global pandemic." It was rapturously received in that moment, but has not worn as well with the passage of time because of every such series since then. It's what used to be called the Sergeant Pepper Syndrome, in which that radically different and frequently brilliant Beatles album spawned a hundred copies, most of which were worse in ways that ranged from merely derivative to monumental excrescence. The next generation of something creative isn't creative any more. It's prodding a parrot to make a noise.
Let us consider, though, not how oppressively narrow a 10-episode history of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, by the Tampa Bay Buccaneers would be, nor how many other teams will realize that they want to do the same thing (spoiler alert: all of them). Let's consider how many of those series could be even less riveting than the history of this particular franchise.
The Bucs have only one thing that makes them unique in the NFL, which is the fact that they lost the first 26 games they played. Per the Bucs' statement on the release, the series uses that as its jumping-off point, painting the remaining 48 years as an ongoing crusade to overcome that historically awful start, which seems on its face to be an awfully generous run-up. Those 48 years have produced an overall success rate of 42 percent, which is fifth worst in the sport. There have been only two real spikes—the 2002 Super Bowl in which the Bucs beat the Oakland Raiders by virtue of having their playbook and terminology ahead of time because their coach, Jon Gruden, had created both, and also the 2020 Super Bowl, which was the last drag of Tom Brady Brand cigarettes.
The rest of it is just a collection of 7-9 seasons with a playoff loss every three years or so on average. Decades of that. Even accounting for all the unprecedented access that the filmmakers receive, this is at some point unprecedented access to Trent Dilfer and Errict Rhett. The press release acknowledges this, breathlessly:
"Fans will be treated to inside stories usually only told from player to player, coach to coach or owner to owner. Why did Hardy Nickerson and Keyshawn Johnson nearly come to blows on a plane flight in January of 2002? How exactly did team ownership pull off the Jon Gruden trade under a total veil of secrecy? What did turkey sandwiches have to do with the birth of current Los Angeles Rams Head Coach Sean McVay's career?"
It's a total miss unless you are a lifelong season ticket holder, in which case you already know all the stories they're going to tell you so you can probably miss it too.
Are there worse ideas for this sort of thing? Yes. The Arizona Cardinals. The Atlanta Falcons. The Houston Texans. The Jacksonville Jaguars. Put in your least favorite team or person as you like, and then really think about spending ten hours with them. It matters not. If Amazon thinks this is a worthwhile expense of time and money, it will have one in the hopper for every other team. Somewhere someone is taking meetings about The Columbus Blue Jackets: A Quarter-Century Of Being A Thing.
Still, the truth is the truth. Ten hours of nearly anything passing itself off as fact-based is open-sore-level painful until proven otherwise, and the Bucs are just another open-faced egg-salad-and-cheese sandwich in a world full of them. Robert Caro's mega-epic The Power Broker is reportedly being adapted by Netflix, and even that is not going to be ten hours long, even though Caro's actually done more than enough work to make it worth the effort. Lane Kiffin is batshit crazy, preposterously self-absorbed, and the greatest sports con man of his era and the 30/30 on him wasn't even an hour in length, although that was done before he puke-machined all over LSU's budget. Still, eliminate a few interviews, add the new job hilarity, and you're still not much past 90 minutes.
Either way, the world is about to get ten more hours of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Why not? It may be busywork, but people will get paid for making it; if you're not making art, at least you're making the rent. Now there's a lofty sentiment to make you want to learn more about the Dirk Koetter era.
