If you live in the intersection between sports fan and Netflix subscriber, you're familiar with the work of Greg Whiteley. Even if you don't know the filmmaker by name, you've probably seen something from his multiverse of incredible sports docuseries, including Last Chance U, Last Chance U: Basketball, and Cheer.
While Netflix's other sports documentaries have ranged from inside looks at major sports leagues to fluffy, athlete-produced retrospectives, Whiteley often takes his crew to the last place you'd look. (Scooba, Mississippi, anyone?) The results are never short of extraordinary, as the documentarian profiles athletes who usually don't make it. By not focusing on, say, anyone you saw open their mouth in The Last Dance, Whiteley sketches beautiful, candid portraits of young lives, who don't have much to lose by fibbing their way through an interview. It's how we met Last Chance U's lovable Ronald Ollie, and Cheer's unbreakable Morgan Simianer. With the streamer flooding my homepage with another sports-doc franchise, Untold—and its increased reliance on telling stories from the POV of highly entertaining, yet factually dubious subjects—I've always counted on Whiteley's work as a North Star for the state of the sports documentary.
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