The women’s locker room is supposed to be a safe space. And yet its feeble record for warding off unwanted attention is underscored time and again in TV tropes and class-action lawsuits. It goes a long way to explaining why, despite the abundance of fly-on-the-wall sports documentaries, you’d be hard-pressed to name one that follows a women’s team as closely and earns enough trust to linger.
In so many ways director Arlene Nelson is breaking the mold with Angel City, a three-part HBO Sports doc that goes inside the same-named LA franchise pushing for change on and off the pitch. The series embeds with the team over the course of the 2022 season, as the National Women’s Soccer League was reeling from an internal investigation that implicated five coaches and a general manager in a toxic workplace scandal marked by verbal abuse, racist remarks and sexual misconduct. “It was really important for us to assure them that we appreciate the need for that protection,” says Nelson, who came to this project from a Secrets of Playboy miniseries that unmasked Hugh Hefner as a predator and sadist. “It was a delicate dance, trying to find that balance of being respectful while also getting the story right.”
