Summary
America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys is safe and curtained, but its middle stretch is simply jam-packed with documentary gold.
As far as subject-approved, rather curtained docuseries go, America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys is closer to something like WWE: Unreal than anything else. This would be – should be, I suppose – a problem, but in practice it doesn’t feel that way, since there’s so much on- and off-field gold in this eight-part Netflix series that it’s scarily reminiscent ofThe Last Dance, which is no bad thing.
It’s also quite opposite-feeling to something likeSEC Football: Any Given Saturday, which was about recent sporting history that doesn’t just feel like it happened yesterday, but in sports terms technically did. This is instead very much about the heyday of the Dallas Cowboys and Jerry Jones, the peak of the popularity that still endures today, even if the success doesn’t. It stars the litany of iconic Super Bowl-winning faces you’d expect, all of whom are riveting interview subjects, though that’s perhaps a consequence of documentarian brothers Chapman and McClain Way putting it all together with a sumptuous sense of craft.
It’s a show for Cowboys fans, NFL fans, sports fans, and documentary fans, in roughly that order; this is pretty undeniable. But it threads the stuff of most appeal to die-hards with the universal underpinnings of what goes into shaping a successful franchise; the bonds of brotherhood, the friendships that don’t survive the rigours, the historic successes and plummeting failures, and how they all revolve around deeply human notions of wanting to succeed and, having succeeded, wanting to be credited for it. Some of it goes on too long, glosses over important subjects that warrant more examination, and feels too hemmed in by the constraints of what is essentially a puff piece, but no matter. So much of it is so good that nobody will really care.
And the Way brothers obviously know this. You can see it every time they leave in a little detail or unvarnished moment, every time the window cracks open to reveal a bit of honest light. But you can especially feel it during the roaring middle episodes that find the Dallas Cowboys at the peak of their powers. This is where America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys roars along with the rumbling efficiency of an expertly calibrated documentary machine, reliving Super Bowl wins through combinations of archival footage and detailed interviews with key players, who break down the ebb and flow of the contests in a depth that couldn’t possibly be replicated by everyday talking heads. It’s a series about winning, from the perspective of winners, and that focus – not to mention the inevitable disinterest in failure it breeds – is the key selling point.
But that unwillingness to really dig into the recent fortunes of the Cowboys, or even some of the earliest backstory on Jerry Jones and head coach Jimmy Johnson, is a bit limiting. I suppose the bigger question is how much people are interested in this stuff relative to the prime performance gold mine. I’m approaching from the perspective of a total novice, so I’d benefit from the whole picture, but you can’t judge a show for performing exactly as advertised. If the Dallas Cowboys really are America’s Team, as the title claims, then it stands to reason that the era in which they claimed that title would be the one of principal focus.
And, as mentioned, it’s simply chock-full of great stuff, ranging from brilliant soundbites to superb drama on the field and off, from crucial insight into the inner workings of a franchise to genuinely redefining moments that have shaped the present-day NFL – and sports in general – thanks to big individual swings that, yes, could quite easily constitute gambles. Not all of them paid off, of course, but no gambler has a 100% hit rate. That’s why it’s called gambling. But the best gamblers know how to ride their wins for everything they’re worth, and Jerry Jones is still astride the horse. A real cowboy, indeed.