The NFL season starts on Wednesday so I thought I’d write abou tthe Netflix series Quarterback today, which has now had three seasons – the latest of which came out in mid July.
Each season follows a group of quarterbacks across the course of an NFL season. The first series followed Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins and Marcus Mariota across the 2022 season, the second saw Cousins return with Joe Burrow and Jared Gough across the 2024 season and the third season in Joe Flacco, Jayden Daniels, Baker Mayfield and Cam Ward in the 2025 season. If you’re wondering why the gap between the first two seasons – the 2023 season saw a documentary series called Receiver about Wide Receivers instead, reportedly because of the difficulties in finding quarterbacks to feature in a second season at the time.
Each season the quarterbacks featured are at different points in their careers. If you know NFL you’ll have already twigged that, but for those of you (most of you?) who don’t, in the first season Mahomes was aiming for his second Super Bowl, Cousins was a decade into his NFL career and the established starter at the Vikings and Mariota was trying to establish himself as a starting quarterback at Atlanta after having spent a couple of seasons as backup or injured.
Quarterback has got great access to the teams and players – it has the subjects mic’d up during their games which was a first for the NFL. It also has Peyton Manning as one of the producers (it’s made by his production company and Patrick Mahomes’ one) and I suspect Peyton is the reason for this. For the non-NFL fans, he’s part of the Manning dynasty – his dad Archie was an NFL quarterback, his younger brother Eli was an NFL quarterback and his nephew Arch is currently quarterback in college footbal for the Texas Longhorns – he’s the son of Peyton’s older brother Cooper who was a highly rated college footballer before his career was cut short due to a spinal condition. Among his many, many accolades Peyton won two Super Bowls and an Super Bowl MVP and he’s rated as one of the best quarterbacks of all time. So if anyone was going to be able to persuade the NFL to give access and players to be involved it’s him.
Because I watch NFL it’s hard for me to judge how appealing this is going to be for people who don’t, but this was one of the first of the series to appear off the back of the success of Drive to Survive and it’s one of the better ones. Break Point (tennis) and Full Swing (golf) appeared earlier in the same year as Quarterback and I didn’t make it through a whole series of either of those. I have watched a bunch of series of Amazon’s documentary series All or Nothing which started with NFL but hasn’t done an NFL series since before the pandemic and has branched out to other sports and I think this offers more for the casual fan because unlike All or Nothing which follows one team each year, this has the wider focus. I watched the first season back when it came out and binged it, tried Receiver when that started and didn’t get through it, then forgot about Quarterback until the third season came out – but then I binged series two in one day and then series three across the next week around actually doing other things, so I clearly enjoy them – even if they haven’t featured Dak Prescott (from my team the Cowboys) yet.
Once I’d finished this, I moved on to Any Given Saturday which is about the 24/25 season in the SEC conference of college football, which was fine – but missing some of the big teams and just generally not as focused as this. So if you like your NFL documentaries it’s an interesting watch, but it’s not an entry point series really.
Happy Sunday – and enjoy the NFL when it starts with the reigning Super Bowl champions the Seahawks at home to the Patriots on Wednesday. I’ve got to wait until next Sunday when the Cowboys open their campaign against the Giants at the stadium which is back to being known as the MetLife after spending the summer as the New York New Jersey stadium for the World Cup.
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