The Fall of Favre, a take on the career and legacy of Brett Favre, is the sort of half-assed exploration of a prominent sports story that we’ve come to expect from Netflix’s Untold series of sports documentaries.
Every weakness of Untold’s approach to the sports documentary form is present here: It doesn’t uncover much, it speeds through years of history while leaving key details out, and despite the name of the series, it’s not especially interested in uncovering anything. I’m not sure I learned a single thing from it that I didn’t know already.
It’s also wildly, aggressively mean-spirited. For quite a few reasons, I strongly dislike Favre, but even I felt like the doc was a bit too harsh on him.
Favre’s Scandals
Brett Favre played in the NFL for 20 seasons, an eventful time that produced a great deal of stories, on and off the field. The Fall of Favre, which lasts just over an hour, is only interested in two of them: The sexting scandal that emerged during Favre’s time with the New York Jets, and the scandal, long after retirement, in which Favre was accused (but never charged with a crime) of mishandling welfare funds from the state of Missisippi.
To be sure, both of those things are very bad, and the documentary is right to take Favre to task for them. But the two scandals happened years apart, don’t really have anything to do with each other, and the film doesn’t really take the time to make the case for Favre’s moral perfidy. (Favre did not participate in the documentary.) It’s also just over an hour long, which is not enough time to tell the story it’s trying to tell.
The film spends a lot of time on the sexting scandal, in which Jenn Sterger, a popular, Internet-famous sports broadcaster, was working for the Jets, and found herself harassed by the team’s quarterback, a man who she, to this day, has never met.
Sterger is interviewed, extensively on camera, and the episode successfully makes the case that she essentially lost her career after not doing anything wrong.
One local reporter says the press all knew about Favre’s womanizing proclivities all along, and Sterger does note that she happens to look almost exactly like Favre’s wife Deanna.
But the sexting story has been told before, more than once and mostly a long time ago, and Untold leaves out key details, especially the part where A.J. Daulerio, the Deadspin journalist who broken an off-the-record pledge and screwed her over, made amends with her over it (Daulerio now writes an excellent newsletter about sobriety).
A Lot Left Out
So much more is left out. Didn’t Favre have a pill addiction early in his career, and alcoholism that he kicked? It talks a lot about Favre’s father, but leaves out the part where Favre played on Monday Night Football days after his dad’s death. (Left in? Shannon Sharpe, of all people, talking on TV about the welfare scandal; it’s hard to imagine Untold not eventually producing a half-assed documentary about his scandals, too.)
The film doesn’t establish just how beyond reproach Favre seemed to be for most of his career. He not only won a Super Bowl and broke records, but he was also the sort of guy who announcers couldn’t stop praising for the entire broadcast. That’s crucial to understanding his “fall.”
That other quarterback who played for the Packers and Jets who now everyone thinks is an asshole, Aaron Rodgers, was also the subject of a recent Netflix documentary, last year’s Enigma, which even had a sitdown between Rodgers and Favre. That doc had Rodgers’ participation, and while it had numerous flaws, at least it told a complete story, and didn’t try to rush through a two-decade career in an hour.
