Showtime’s The Kings is the Best Sports Docu-Series That Nobody is Talking About

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Smml9BovT0

If we learned anything about ESPN’s 2020 runaway hit docuseries The Last Dance, it’s that television viewers appear to have an insatiable appetite for sports nostalgia, which is why the lack of buzz surrounding Showtime’s The Kings so confounding.

The Kings is a four-part series featuring “four champions who ushered in a boxing renaissance” and “showcases the dominance of Roberto Duran, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, Thomas Hearns, and Sugar Ray Leonard and their battles in and out of the ring,” according to Showtime’s website. But it’s really so much more.

The first episode opens with Sugar Ray’s gold medal in the 1976 Montreal Olympics before documenting his rivalry with Panamanian Duran, but told with the context of the rise of American nationalism vis-a-vis future President Ronald Reagan and his pledge to “Make America Great Again.”

There is terrific archival footage of boxers training, holding press conferences, and yes, of course, the actual matches. Producers do a terrific job of shielding results, so viewers still feel great anticipation of how each fight will turn out as though they are reliving them for the first time. (If there is one quibble, it’s that Showtime didn’t provide the filmmakers with enough of a rights and clearances budget, so fight footage is too often cut with after-effects treated stills to save money.) Viewers see “Hit Man” Hearns and Hagler’s rise to fame from Detroit and Brockton, Massachusetts, respectively, and how the narrative of each’s rise to boxing glory interweaves with one another.

But this is more than simply a tale of boxers rising to fame, and of course, dealing with its trappings. It’s a return to a simpler time, not just of boxing, when one could watch a fight on network television (or maybe on HBO, then rebroadcast on network television three weeks later.) It’s a reminder of how less was often more in a media world that is currently overwhelmed with baseless hype that, for example, leads to Floyd Mayweather going 15 rounds with Logan Fucking Paul. Yeah, that really happened (and we want to know why boxing is a dying sport?)

In the interest of candor, I have so far only watched the first two episodes, and I am waiting to watch the rest of the series with my 18 and 14-year-old sons because a) they enjoyed watching The Last Dance so much (after which we all decided we didn’t like Michael Jordan) and b) this series is a remarkable window into the late 70s and early 80s America in which I grew up.

Again it’s not just the terrific footage of Howard Cosell interviewing boxers and promoters alike or the political context of then-President Jimmy Carter handing over the Panama Canal to Panama. It’s Sugar Ray’s rise to fame as a spokesman for 7UP, and the incredibly smart portrayal of how the United States evolved in a post-Vietnam era into a Reagan era, and how the sport of boxing was sort of a proxy.

Look, the only point of this column is to bring attention to an amazing, well-produced, and fascinating documentation of an overlooked period in time, which also happens to coincide with a Golden Era of boxing. Maybe the last, greatest time for the sport. Watch it. You will not be disappointed.

Watch the trailer above via Showtime.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.