Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
One of the fun meta subplots of HBO’s Hard Knocks, an HBO reality show that focuses on an individual NFL team during training camp, is that none of the teams involved ever want to be involved. NFL coaches are notoriously paranoid and secrecy-obsessed, so the last thing they want during the period of the season in which they have the most control over their team is NFL Films cameras peering around every corner, causing the dreaded “distraction.” You’re just trying to watch film and go through your personnel depth charts, and next thing you know, your cornerback is out there forgetting the names of all his kids for the entire world to see, and then you have to deal with that.
It’s little wonder the NFL has taken to forcing teams to participate. (This year it will be the Los Angeles Rams.) Who wants that headache? That’s why it was so exciting to hear that Amazon had partnered with NFL Films to produce All Or Nothing, an eight-part series about the Arizona Cardinals. The advantage was to be that the producers would embed with the team during the season but not air the show until after it was over, sort of the sports streaming video equivalent of What It Takes, or maybe Game Change. Without the pressure of worrying about an in-season “distraction,” the theory went, players and coaches could let their freak flag fly. We could see what it’s really like inside that locker room.
I’m sad to say, though, that this series feels less like an invitation to behind-the-scenes intrigue and more like an officially sanctioned, NFL-approved, unusually long Season Wrapup Video, like the ones you used to get free when you subscribed to Sports Illustrated. (Unless you wanted the helmet phone.) The production values are higher, there’s a few stray shots of the weight room, the in-game NFL Films sequences are stirring, but otherwise: This is nothing you haven’t seen before. And more than that: It’s so tied into the official NFL narrative of Heroic Men Doing Heroic Things in Heroically American Ways that it feels less like an peek inside the workings of a football team and more like NFL Pravda. The result —this lifelong Arizona Cardinals fan says with considerable lament— is surprisingly dull.
It’s worth noting first-off that much of the inside-the-huddle stuff from Hard Knocks – footage that’s a lot easier to grab in the more relaxed, open, less media-prevalent atmosphere of training camp – isn’t here; this is more about the men who choose the roster for the Arizona Cardinals than it is the Arizona Cardinals themselves. Sure, there are your occasional spinoffs into human interest stories – and they’re produced like Meet The Olympic soft-focus puff pieces you’ll see on NBC in a month – and personnel issues like the crushing late-season injury to star safety Tyrann Mathieu, but the stars of All Or Nothing are the Cardinals braintrust: Team president Michael Bidwill, general manager Steve Keim and coach Bruce Arians. The team’s successes – of which there are plenty; the Cardinals went 13-3 and reached the NFC Championship Game – and their failures are all seen through their eyes, which is sort of like having one of those sports video game simulations where you construct a team’s roster and salary cap and stadium concession prices, but you don’t get to actually play the games. Each game (and the show is mostly broken up game-by-game, also like a postseason highlight video) features the three men huddled around a conference room, tossing empty expository slogans back and forth to each other, but mostly the cameras. Then they go into the video room, where the real work is done. The players are mostly seen in passing, or as pawns. The show sees players the way NFL sees players: Helpful, but mostly expendable, and definitely not the real people in charge.
The breakout star of the show is Arians (above), a 63-year-old man from New Jersey who nevertheless wears Kangols, curses constantly and has the cadence of third-tier rapper. (There are moments when I wondered if Arians was openly aping Drexl Spivey from True Romance.) I’m not sure the show explains to me why he’s such a great football coach — which he is – but he’s always entertaining to have on screen. Unfortunately, Keim and especially Bidwill are less so; you actually find yourself wondering if Bidwill – who is ownership, after all, and not a football mind – is in all these meetings just because the documentary is airing. He mostly says things like, “Big game this week!” and “this team has heart!” a lot. He’s basically set direction.
The whole thing has the stink of NFL mythology reeking off it, from the overly dramatic storming-the-beach-at-Normandy score to the constant talk of the “shield” to the total lack of discussion of player safety or well-being to elevation of team success above all other things (a scene with Keim’s family complaining how Daddy is never home plays a lot sadder than I suspect the NFL might have intended) to, above all, some of the most banal, cliché-addled narration from Jon Hamm I have ever heard in a documentary. Jon Hamm is a terrific actor, and just as good a voice-over star: I’m always a little more likely to buy a particular car if he’s telling me to do so. But here he’s addled with a constant stream of motivational coffee mug lines like “On the road to a championship, the closer you get, the harder each step becomes” and “A fast start doesn’t tell you everything. But it might tell you all you need to know.” Hamm’s narration is so hackily written that I found myself narrating my life with it in my head for a few days after finishing the show. (“Getting a crying baby back to sleep might not mean you reached the mountaintop. But it’s how you know it’s within sight.”) The show never challenges the NFL, or the players, or the coaches, or anything other than the official narrative: Men are men, men are champions, the NFL is all, we have always been at war with Eurasia.
There is still much for the football fan to enjoy, particularly the game footage, which is shot as splendidly and intimately as has come to be expected from NFL Films. The seventh episode, in particular, is a standout; it’s the one that showcases the amazing NFL Divisional Playoff win over the Green Bay Packers, one of the best football games I’ve ever seen. If you love the Arizona Cardinals like me, the series is a pleasant reminder of perhaps the best season in franchise history. (It also made me want to tear my hair out about Carson Palmer’s postseason faceplant all over again.) If you love the NFL, this might help whet your appetite for the league to return. But if you’re expecting to learn anything how this league works, or even much about the people who make it work, this won’t tell you much more than a press release. (Said in best Jon Hamm voice): “All or nothing …. Sometimes it can’t tell you anything. But sometimes it can still tell you enough.”
[Watch All Or Nothing: A Season With The Arizona Cardinals on Amazon Prime Video]
Will Leitch is a senior writer for Sports On Earth, culture writer for Bloomberg Politics, film critic for the New Republic, contributing editor at New York magazine and the founder of Deadspin.
