When is a documentary not a documentary? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself while watching previews of the new season of Welcome to Wrexham, which returns to FX (US) and Disney+ next week. The documentary follows the takeover of the down-on-its-luck north Walian football club by Hollywood stars Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, who are intent on dragging it out of the doldrums of the fifth tier of English football.
Welcome to Wrexham serves as a new high watermark, in exposure at least, of the remarkable streaming-powered boom in sports documentaries in recent years. All or Nothing, Drive to Survive, Hard Knocks, Break Point: if a sport is being played in professional form, there’s probably a camera crew capturing it. What unites these docs is their veneer of access all areas authenticity – managers swearing violently at players, Nick Kyrgios doing Nick Kyrgios things – but with that slight nagging feeling that things might be slightly more polished than they seem.
Welcome to Wrexham takes that feeling to a new extreme, blurring the lines between verité and artifice like few docs I’ve ever seen (discounting something like The Arbor, where that blurring is kind of the point). In Welcome to Wrexham, authentic moments (euphoria at last minute goals, furious reactions to send offs) rub up against what could be generously described as skits – a cutaway of McElhenney seething as Reynolds gets to witness Wrexham win without him, or in the new series the pair responding with slack-jawed incredulity at the visit of King Charles to their club.
These pre-planned moments are often quite fun – the pair are great comic performers, and there is a crackling chemistry between them. At the same time, they have the unfortunate side-effect of making you question the moments that are putatively unscripted – see the owners learning they will have to pay for a pricey pitch refurbishment. And it also makes you wonder what is being left out.
In fairness to Welcome to Wrexham, it is at least open about its authored nature, compared to those shows pretending to offer a warts-and-all experience. And there’s a great deal to enjoy. It’s skilfully made, doing a great job of highlighting the constellation of characters hovering around the football club. Its best moments often don’t involve Reynolds and McElhenney at all, a notable moment is when star striker Paul Mullin (above) speaks insightfully about his son’s autism diagnosis, a thread picked up again in the best of the series two episodes.
At the same time, it’s hard not to be a little alarmed at the direction of travel. The line between subject and film-maker is becoming increasingly blurred: squint at the credits of many sports documentaries, not to mention music documentaries, and you’ll likely see the artist or athlete being profiled also listed as a producer. This was the case with Michael Jordan in The Last Dance (below), a series that, while serving as a new high watermark for kinetic, serialised sports documentary-making, was also, well, a little one-eyed. (Welcome to Wrexham is co-produced by Reynolds’ Maximum Effort arm, with Reynolds and McElhenney both listed as executive producers on the show.)
Bill Simmons, founder of sports and culture site The Ringer and one of the people behind 30 for 30, the ESPN series that revolutionised sports documentaries in the 2010s, describes these subject-controlled works as: documercials. Like informercials, they look and sound like regular programming, but underneath there’s a whiff of promo about them. The rise of these documercials is, in a sense, understandable. Makers of documentaries that depend on the participation of talent are in a bit of a bind: they need access to athletes or artists at the centre of the stories, but that might lead to a degree of editorial control and self-censorship from those figures.
Those trade offs might seem worth it when the end result is something as widely lauded as The Last Dance, but they start to look less appealing when you consider something like Netflix’s recent miniseries Untold: Swamp Kings, a telling of the 00s ascendence of the Florida Gators college football team that elected to largely sidestep negative aspects of that story, including the small matter of one of their most high-profile players being a murderer.
Still, if sports documentaries like Welcome to Wrexham are starting to feel a little too stage-managed, there is one thing they cannot tightly control: events on the pitch. The show’s first season ended not with the team triumphantly clinching a return to the Football League, but crashing out of the National League playoffs in a vaguely absurd 5-4 defeat to Grimsby Town. From a dramatic storytelling point of view, that wasn’t exactly an unwelcome outcome, but you do wonder quite how the show might try and stage-manage a mediocre mid-table finish in a future season. Because I’m not sure even the charisma of Ryan Reynolds could overcome a dour 0-0 at MK Dons.
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