Netflix’s Quarterback follows Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins, and Marcus Mariota through the 2022 NFL season, but it can’t quite balance their life on the field and off.
Netflix’s newest sports docuseries, Quarterback, suggests that playing QB is the hardest position anyone can play in a team sport. The filmmakers might be right. But the history and drama packed into the position is so complicated that boiling it down to a TV show means missing the complications and details that make the position so difficult, at least in the first season.
Quarterback follows three QBs — the Kansas City Chiefs’ Patrick Mahomes, the Minnesota Vikings’ Kirk Cousins, and the Atlanta Falcons’ Marcus Mariota — as they progress through the 2022 NFL season. But unlike Netflix’s biggest sports series, Formula 1: Drive to Survive, the football-focused series struggles to bring out the human side of the elite athletes; we see them at home with their kids, but never get a sense of what that means for them on the field. The good news is that there are plenty of ways to fix Quarterback and help it go from OK to great.Pick more interesting players
Games are won by putting the best guys on the field. Quarterback season 1 doesn’t do that. While the show’s main coup was landing Mahomes, the 27-year-old Chiefs quarterback/prodigy, the rest of the cast pales in comparison. The aggressively fine Cousins and Mariota, a player who lost his starting job midway through last season, are inevitably lost in Mahomes’ shadow. A second season of Quarterback would benefit from a more intriguing, more successful cast of QBs. Also, just a bigger one. More players being followed with cameras would give more opportunities for more interwoven storylines and fast-footed edits. Here’s one suggestion: Get the Buffalo Bills’ Josh Allen on this show along with Mahomes so we can see their continuing AFC shootout and rivalry.
