Players Uses League of Legends to Satirize Sports Docs, and It’s Hilarious: Review
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The post Players Uses League of Legends to Satirize Sports Docs, and It’s Hilarious: Review appeared first on Consequence.
The Pitch: What Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story did for music biopics, Netflix’s American Vandal did for the true-crime docuseries. For two glorious seasons of adolescent dick and poop jokes painted with all the forensic seriousness of Making a Murderer, Tony Yacenda (who also directed episodes of Dave and real-life true crime doc Trial by Media) and Dan Perrault perfectly threaded the needle between the melodramatic trivia of teenhood and the over-the-top mechanics of true crime.
After that show’s unceremonious cancellation, Yacenda and Perrault are back with another pointed critique of the documentary format and the juvenile antics of manchildren. This time, the question is: What would The Last Dance look like if it were actually about mouthbreathing esports stars?
Whereas ESPN’s acclaimed doc about the greatest run in Michael Jordan’s career celebrated a man at his peak, Players follows a 27-year-old League of Legends hot shot who goes by the username “Creamcheese” (Misha Brooks) — an egotistical, blustering griefer who’s six years into an ill-advised promise that his team would “like, probably win seven championships.” Currently, his team, Fugitive, has won zero.
However, his corporate sponsors have recruited a new star player to shake up his place in the pecking order: Organizm (Da’Jour Jones), a 17-year-old Twitch streamer who’s quiet and contemplative in comparison to Creamcheese’s brash overconfidence. The two will just have to find a way to get along, with the help of their self-serious coach Braxton (Eli Henry), if they want to win.
Players (Paramount+)
30 for 60 FPS: We’re all at least vaguely familiar with the rhythms and aesthetics of the modern sports doc — the dramatic music, the slick graphics sliding across the screen, the solemn contextualizing of talking-head interviews against gray backgrounds. Players nails that vibe to a tee, with Yacenda (who directs all ten episodes) never taking his formal eye off the satirical ball.
The gag, after all, is treating the gaming of a bunch of skinny 20-year-olds with all the gravitas of multi-million-dollar physical sports franchises (aided, I’m sure, by the fact that League of Legends is itself a highly lucrative esports platform, awarding millions of dollars in prize money and incredible fame and fortune for its real players).
But there’s still an innate silliness to the internecine conflicts and inflated egos of an esport like LoL, which Players highlights with some neat analogues to The Last Dance‘s own operatic approach. Creamcheese is interviewed in a spacious living room not unlike MJ’s meme-worthy talking heads in that doc; episodes frequently structure themselves around past embarrassments that contextualize the present, shown in ominous flashback with studious narration by LoL players and commentators. Brutal play-by-plays detail the importance of things like “wombo combos” and oft-underlooked LoL champions like Yuumi the Magical Cat.
Giving Them Grief: Just like any good bagel, though, the real secret to Players‘s success is Creamcheese. Played to bratty perfection by Misha Brooks, Creamcheese is a fading star, an aging relic at the ripe old age of 27 who refuses to believe he’s missed a step and swaggers through life with all the confidence of someone who was lifted up as a star far too young. He’s every nebbishly Jewish kid in streetwear, coasting off his early fame even as his abrasiveness turns off teammate and classmate alike. (Some history: his username used to be Nutmilk, though the league made him change it to something more appropriate. “I could be talking about any kind of milk!” he smirks.)
Creamcheese has a Michael Scott-esque air of tragedy to him, someone who acts out to get friends but only manages to alienate others. As the episodes proceed, we see one brick after another layered onto his darkly comic mythology: We see old friends turn to bitter enemies, new besties get pushed to the side for the sake of the team, longtime girlfriends realizing he had no place for them in his insular esporting life.
Players (Paramount+)
The one guy who can still stand him is Braxton, his childhood best friend and now coach, who dispenses Coach Taylor-esque speeches with an endearingly breathy wheeze. “When the everyday person thinks of professional gamers, they think of these Greek Gods,” he explains to the camera. He’s a great foil for Creamcheese’s outsized personality, the steady hand that keeps all the silliness in check — even if he has to rip off speeches from Hoosiers to do it.
Then there’s Organizm, whose greatest crime in Creamcheese’s eyes is his very existence on the team; (Yacenda and Jones walk a delicate, subtle tightrope when discussing the dynamics of race in gaming, from the early Hoop Dreams-like recruitment chat with the parents to the hanger-on entourage who want to profit off his budding success.) He’s got his own conflicts to overcome, from his problems with communication to his parasitic family who have no idea or interest in his career until the sponsorship deals start rolling in.
Where Creamcheese is a victim of his own hype, Organizm suffers from crippling insecurity and a surfeit of seriousness; in the moments where they start finding common ground and start to work together, Players functions as excitingly as any real-life sports melodrama.
Oops, I Did It Again: Sure, there’s no enticing #WhoDrewtheDicks mystery to draw you through Players‘ entire season, but instead Yacenda and Perrault build up Team Fugitive’s rocky road through the 2021 championship season with all the high-stakes drama of a great sports story. There are interteam conflicts, heated arguments in locker rooms, breathless speculation from pundits and rivals about the team’s future, brutal between-game takedowns over social media… The list goes on.
Each of the characters, from braggarts like Creamcheese to quiet mice like import player Nightfall (Youngbun Chung), manage a steady supply of killer deadpan lines (“I could be in a Totino’s Pizza Roll commercial within a fucking hour!” Creamcheese screams at his owner about why he’s a more valuable branding asset than Organizm).
The Verdict: Much like Vandal, the real thrill of Players isn’t just the deadpan perfection of its joke delivery, but its ability to build the real-world stakes and characters of the best sports docs on top of the gags. Even if you’re a total n00b to League of Legends, you can watch the expressions on players’ faces, feel the music and editing build, latch onto Team Fugitive’s successes and victories and parse what they mean for the characters themselves.
That it sells the drama while also poking fun at the innate absurdity of esports and its attending personalities is maybe Players‘s secret weapon. And it all builds towards a second season that promises more scintillating dynamics for Creamcheese and Organizm, and more rapturous odes to Taco Bell Cantina. (“It’s like Taco Bell After Dark,” after all.)
Where’s It Playing? Players goes for the wombo combo on Paramount+ starting June 16th.
Trailer:
Players Uses League of Legends to Satirize Sports Docs, and It’s Hilarious: Review
Clint Worthington
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