Starved for Sports? Here Are 5 Options That Aren’t N.B.A. Classic

Vice TV’s highest-rated show is this solidly produced, highly watchable documentary series about professional wrestling, the spectacle that assumes the persona of a sport. Its creators, Evan Husney and Jason Eisener, are clearly fans, but there’s enough professionalism and detachment at play that the show works on multiple levels: as inside dope for the aficionado, as cultural anthropology for the curious and as drive-by bloodletting for the gawkers and the haters.

The show is currently in its second season, which opened with a two-part examination of the life and horrible death of Chris Benoit, a major star who killed himself (using one of his weight lifting machines) after murdering his wife and 7-year-old son. A standard true-crime exercise, it takes head-on the various explanations for Benoit’s breakdown: depression, steroid abuse and chronic brain damage, all just part of the gig. If at the same time it slightly sentimentalizes the memory of Benoit and the esprit de corps of the sport, that seems less a function of design than of the honestly conflicted feelings of the colleagues, friends and family members who are interviewed.

The dopamine rush of vaudeville and violence that pro wrestling can provide both fans and performers is fully embodied in the season’s third episode, a profile of Jerome Young, who wrestled as New Jack and blurred lines that were already pretty hard to see. Young, now 57, genially narrates footage of himself throwing a rival from a three-story scaffolding and repeatedly stabbing another wrestler during a match, all while enthusiastically playing the role of an angry, frightening black villain. Now that’s entertainment.

Streaming at Vice on TV; new episodes 9 p.m. Tuesdays, Vice.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/14/arts/television/sports-TV.html