MovieChat Forums > A Football Life (2011) Discussion > Mediocre series

Mediocre series

posted 8 years ago by Joes_Mom
2 replies | jump to latest

"A Football Life" tries to present itself as the NFL Network's answer ESPN's "30 for 30" series. However, after watching many of it's episodes, I can only conclude that it is a very mediocre series. It is more on the level with ESPN's older series "Sports Century" and its in-house competition with "30 for 30" called "E:60" (no doubt created because ESPN wanted its own self-developed series to compete with the Bill Simmons-created "30 for 30").

"A Football Life" just scratches the surface of the topics and people it pretends to a deep dive on. Just watching the Warren Moon and Randall Cunningham episodes, you can see how quickly the filmmakers want to gloss over all segments of their subject. They spend 30 seconds talking about Warren Moon's time in Canada, and about 2 minutes talking about his career in Houston after his rookie season. The producers are trying to cram as much as possible into a 1 hour episode without digging into any depth on it. "A Football Life" needs to do what "30 for 30" does: either cutout some of the extraneous material to focus on the deeper story, or expand the episode to 90 minutes to 2 hours to give the subject the treatment it deserves.

Alas, the producers and filmmakers for "A Football Life" just aren't near the quality of the ones for "30 for 30", and it shows in the final product.

(As a side note, NFL Network's "America's game" does achieve that level of quality that "A Football Life" wishes for)

[–] DACHokie 8 years ago

I love this series (and the 30 for 30 series, as well), but I look at them differently. 30 for 30 is a investigative-journalism type series where each episode is custom-taylored to a director/producer that has an affinity for the topic (fan-based) and is given liberties that allow the topic to be deeply discussed, for as long as it takes (sometimes, over 2 hours). I don't find any of the 30 for 30 episodes following the same pattern. The perspective is unique and somewhat neutral.

A Football Life episodes generally follow a similar script and are limited primarily to one hour episodes. While EVERY issue on the subject matter may not be covered in depth, the show does a pretty good job illustrating the deeper person behind the player/coach we know publicly. I found the shows on Bruce Arians, Chris Speilman, John Riggins, Dexter Manley, Houston '93 and Roger Staubach particularly interesting and informative. I have yet to see a better sports biography series ... i don't consider 30-for-30 to be biographical in nature.

[–] doggie_rodriguez 8 years ago

Alas, the producers and filmmakers for "A Football Life" just aren't near the quality of the ones for "30 for 30", and it shows in the final product.

Alas, that is just an opinion. I find the series to be right on par with 30 for 30.