The Prestige TV Podcast - 'Sunderland 'Til I Die'

Episode Date: May 5, 2020

If you're missing live soccer right now, 'Sunderland 'Til I Die' is a great soccer docuseries to fill that need. It's in the same vein as 'All or Nothing,' 'First Team: Juventus,' and 'The English Game.'  Hosts: Chris Ryan and Kevin Clark Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hello and welcome to TV concierge daily podcast where Ringer staffers help you navigate the crowded TV landscape. I'm Chris Ryan and today I am joined by Kevin Clark and we are here to discuss Sunderland Till I Die. Kev, give people the short pitch on why they should watch Sunderland Till I Die. Did you ever want to see Ricky Jervase's character from the office, David Brent, run a soccer team? Yes. That's it. That's the pitch. So Charlie Methon, so there's two seasons and two regimes. And so the first season of Sunday,

Until I Die is about their first four-end of the championship after dropping down from the Premier League. They go back down to the championship. And then they struggle. And for people who don't know what that means, that would be basically the equivalent of if a major league baseball team suddenly had to go play AAA. Right.

It's supposed to be a glorious triumph for them to get back up. They end up firing their manager. They end up basically being revealed as sort of a clown show. And then they go down again. So imagine that that major league baseball team is in AA, and that's where season two picks up. There are new owners because of the financial mismanagement, basically that the owner Ella Short is wanted to get rid of it.

And this new guy, Stuart Donald comes in. He installs number two named Charlie Methven, who is... So there's a scene in season two where he decides to start playing techno in the stadium that... Let's say Pine Barrens is the best episode of TV of all time. Sure. right behind it is Charlie Methven saying, I want the atmosphere to be a little bit Abitha.

Like that's, that's where we're at with season two. It was, they come in with all sorts of bad ideas. They come in saying they're going to financially manage the team and there's going to be no more free lunches anymore. And then by episode like four, they're doubling their bid for Will Grig

and making the same mistakes that everybody else makes. It's a really intriguing look into the city. and how I think one of the mistakes, having seen this now, that American access TV makes, whether that's hard knocks or all or nothing, is there's nothing on the relationship. You know, I think Cleveland would be an amazing scene to explore the relationship between this long-suffering team and their long-suffering fan base. Sundewan does a really good job of that. And then you also just get a look at the team and how things work.

I think that there's a long history of sort of tell-all soccer books, whether that's all played out by Pete Davies or the glory game before that about Tottenham Hotspur where there's a fly on the wall and they just tell you what's really going on inside these locker rooms. And I think Sunderland Till I die does a really good job at sort of updating that for the Netflix age. Yeah, I mean, a couple of years ago, I think, maybe five, six years ago, I remember watching hard knocks and thinking, why don't we just do a lot of these? Like, why do we have to wait for this once a year? And now we were reaping what we sow, because if you open up any one of your streaming services right now, you're practically drowning in all access docuseries about any number of

sports clubs from any number of leagues. There's a preponderance of professional soccer ones right now, much to my delight since I don't have any soccer to watch for the most part. And for the most part, they are about good teams. Manchester City, Bruchia Dortman, Juventus, all have series tracking them. The Brazilian national team.

The Brazilian national team. And you can find those there are all or nothing on Amazon. And then there's a bunch that are on Netflix. The Juventus one is on Netflix. And I think the Juventus one is my favorite of that batch. The Sunderland one is unique in that it is about a failure. It's about a collapse. And it is a really interesting, like Kevin said,

sociocultural snapshot of a place in England that was sort of at the forefront or the tip of the spear for the Brexit movement. It was the first sort of, when they had the original Brexit referendum, Sunderland was the first area to kind of go leave. that was a very, it was a shocking development because Sunderland is traditionally a pretty labor, a labor stronghold and labor had associated itself with Remain. And so there's this interesting

dynamic going on there in terms of the portrait of the city. And then, you know, I think that what typically happens is when a team drops down from the Premier League into the championship, they get something called a parachute payment. So they have a lot of money coming to them and they wind up more often than not. I'm not sure about the math. But it's their best opportunity to go back to the Premier League is right after they've been relegated, because that's when they have their coffers are relatively full. And not only does Sunderland not go back to the

Premier League, but they have a really hard time of it otherwise. And that's a pretty rare thing to have so much a fly-on-the-wall insight into. Yeah. And they are, I think that the ownership or the leadership in both seasons doesn't know what they don't know. And so they present themselves. I saw that the producers of the documentary said that the new owners, Charlie Methven and Stuart Donald, were honest to a fault. And that's actually how you create good television. Like, that's, the office comparison is not that far off because they are saying things they think are crushing it. And they're just not crushing it. Like, that's the simplest way to say it. Even in the first season, there's a scene where Martin Bain, who's the CEO, was like, man, we should get Jack

Rodwell, who's like the bust to just cancel his contract. And like, that would save us so much money. Which is just incredibly unrealistic. And they spend 10 minutes on him just being like, well, we're going to give him to the end of his day to cancel his contract and then we can free up money. There's no incentive for him to cancel his contract. And so you're just sitting there being like, why does this guy think this is like a saving great? This is going to save him, that this guy's going to out of nobility say, I don't want your paychecks anymore. I mean, it was just, it was an interesting insight. You know, you talked about why we don't have more of these with hard knocks. I told the story on Bachelor Party a couple weeks ago about Formula One,

but I had told the NFL, some NFL executives about the Formula One series a couple of years ago when it first came out. And I said, you guys should be doing this. And they said they've talked about releasing all or nothing weekly during the season. And that's the next step. But they are so correctly worried about just the level of access football coaches want to give. NFL coaches want to give. And they're not going to be in the world. Worried because they worry that they would want to be too candid?

No, just the opposite. It would actually be very boring. And what you have in Sunderland is a type of desperation that leads itself to brutal honesty. And I think that you're not, you don't get that very often. And you don't get that with like a man's city where everything was firing on all cylinders. And that's why I think that this was uniquely positioned to teach us a lot about how sports works and how bad sports works. Yeah. And also, I mean, if you've been even a relatively casual fan of the Premier League over the last, I'd say 10 to 15 years, you'll see some names that you recognize probably.

I mean, especially in season one, Sunderland features a few holdovers from Manchester United's Glory Days like Darren Gibson and John O'Shea, not necessarily the greatest players who ever put on red and black, but they are at least notable names. And you can really see,

like Lee Cattermole shows up. He's in that, the five first season, but you can really see that like, some of the people in the dock really have stars in their eyes. They're like, this is really cool that I get to talk to a camera crew all the time because a club like Sunderland is not usually the subject for this much attention. Right. Yes, exactly. And then Chris Coleman came in halfway through the season one, who was Wales's manager at the Euros. He's a little more of established guy. And he did not like the arrangement. He was pretty candid in saying, I don't like the fact that those cameras everywhere. And that revealed itself when a fan called him, was it a wanker? I don't remember what it was. I think it was.

And instead of him brushing it off, he stopped. Cameras on him and just start screaming like, I'm a father of four kids. Like, how dare you call me that? Yeah. It was a real, like, I drive a Dodge Stratus movie. Yeah. It was really, it was a very tense moment.

And that's the kind of thing. Again, you don't get that unless you happen to be chronicling a bad team. There's a reason this is not coming back. And it's probably because the ownership is like, this is not making us look as good as we thought it was going to look. While we have whoever is still listening to this, while we still have their attention, Kevin, why don't we tell them a little bit about some of the other global soccer docs and docu-series that we've been watching, especially during these last couple weeks, but in general,

because we are having kind of a moment with these things. Can I pitch you on the English game, Julian Fellows? Absolutely. Julian Fellows' miniseries about the beginnings of soccer, when a team that had working class, essentially iron or coal workers, went against the old Etonians who were alumni or of Eden. And they played in the FA Cup. It is ludicrous.

It is barely historical. But I could not get enough of it. Like they merge different teams. They said teams that one in one year, one in the other, like, whatever. They played fast and loose with the facts. They invented entire arcs and narratives. They left out huge parts of the history. It's fine.

This was, and I mean this in the nicest way possible, if a Ralph Lauren catalog from like 1994 became self-aware. Like that's what this was. Like the games, everyone's wearing great long-sleeved t-shirts and nice shorts. Everybody looks phenomenal, just incredible grooming. I enjoyed it from just a, like my wife loves downtown abbey i love soccer we were like julian fellows does soccer we're in you know

exactly what it's going to look like okay and and it is that there's nothing that strays from this is julian fellows doing soccer and it's funny because i had read about there's a book called the ball is round by david goldblatt where they talk about when old atonians played the team and went up five one and then and then ended up being tied five five the game that that's illustrated early in the series. And it seems like a kind of hardscrabble game that you wouldn't want to, I don't know. I mean, it's co-workers. It's hard to glamorize it. And Julianne Fellows turns it into a glamorous, glamorous thing. It is a beautiful thing to watch. I would just recommend that people check out First Team Juventus. That's probably my favorite one of the team portrait ones that are up now.

You can, like we said before, there's the Brazilian National Team one. Man City and Bruce U. Dortman both have documentaries on Amazon, but first team Juventis is on Netflix. And I really like it. The big one is when all or nothing Tottenham comes out, which will illustrate Maricio Pachino's downfall with unlimited access, which is like, that is a mixture of the kind of good teams we're talking about, plus the Sunderland Till I die desperation aspect. I think that has the real possibility to be

amazing. Yeah, I can't wait for that one. But yeah, the Juventus one is great just because of the insight it gives into like, not the private lives, like you learn a lot about, like, you know, like anything about their families necessarily, although you do get to see some nice moments of players of their families. But I really love to like what life is like in Turin, Italy for a really well-played soccer player. It's pretty awesome. Like Claudio Marchizio and Gigi Bufon and all these guys who have like just these amazing villas and just take coffee in the middle of the day and like kick a ball back and forth with their kid for a few

And it's a really, really cool portrait and it's really interesting. You just get to see a lot of Italy in it. And it's a really cool doc. Really, I mean, these are, these are sports shows. It's only like six episodes. So it's pretty easy to get through. All of these are sports shows, but they're really just merge or something else. Like a lot of the good team stuff, it's really just like HGTV.

It's like, wow, look at, look at Gigi Buffone's house. That's amazing. Like, it's, it's that. It is endlessly entertaining. And there's a reason that these succeed. And there's a reason, quite frankly, that I think a show like Hard Knocks has become a little bit stale and might need to to shake things up a little bit

with some of the ideas barred from more of these forward-looking documentaries. Yeah, I agree with you. So we've got Sunderland Till I Die. We've got a bunch of other football documentaries, the English game and, and Juventus' first team. Check them out, but Sunderland until I die is definitely worth your time. And leads on Amazon. Yes, I want to talk about this very quickly.

So Bielsa is a lunatic. Yeah. And more of him is a good thing. I would say the only thing, Russell Crow is the narrator. You get a lot of Russell Crow. If you were worried about not having enough Russell Crow in isolation, you got him. And I think that the only thing is that once Bielsa gets there, it's generally competent and things are on the upswing. So you don't get a lot of the, yeah.

It has the makings of something great, but they're just like, things were going well for them. With the exception, by the way, of the fight with Frank Lampard, which obviously is part of that. but it's still really good and worth of watch. Yeah, Leeds is sort of the flip side of Sunderland. They're like, they're doing it right in the second division where Sunderland just kind of goes basement diving. All right, Kevin, thank you so much. This has been TV concierge.

We'll be back tomorrow with some more TV talk.