Starting Five

and the Netflix sports soap

Longtime adherents to the cult of Constructive Criticism will know that I am a huge basketball fan. I’ve tried to put into words why I love it many times, but like with most great obsessions, it is hard to talk about it with non-obsessives. Even those around me who initiated me into this unique fandom have been left somewhat in the dust, as it were, but my own fanaticism. Now only the Ringer podcastverse and some select people on Twitter really understand me, and to this I have become resigned.

But what’s this I hear in the distance? Is that the sound of a new Netflix sports documentary dropping? And one… produced by the Obamas?! Perhaps the content gods will bring me a new spate of converts.

Starting Five follows in the grand tradition of Netflix gourmet cheeseburger content. It follows five current basketball hot boys: Lebron James of the Los Angeles Lakers, Anthony Edwards of the Minnesota Timberwolves, Jimmy Butler of the Miami Heat, Jayson Tatum of the Boston Celtics, and Domantas Sabonis of the Sacramento Kings. It follows in the grand and lucrative Netflix tradition of sports documentaries that are actually mostly advertorials, puff pieces, and soap operas. Other entries include Quarterback, Receiver, Full Swing, Break Point, and Formula 1: Drive to Survive. The immediate appeal of these programs is in the access they give. They follow famous people “behind the scenes,” giving you locker room frustration, audible “fucks” from the court or the green or the field, and plenty of WAG time. They break no news, nor do they ever show a player in a light they’ve haven’t agreed to be shown in. What they do instead is place a season of sports in a narrative context. They tell you the story of a year starring your favorite characters, and in doing so manage to occasionally touch what makes sports great.

I have always loved soap operas, be it the drawing room soap (Austen, Heyer), the monsters as metaphors for our feelings soap (Twin Peaks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), the gothic who did I marry soap (Jane Eyre, Rebecca), or the detectives who should kiss soap (Law and Order: SVU, The X-Files), to name a few. To be a soap opera your business must be the human soul, it’s breadth of emotion and its depth of feeling. To call all these “soap operas” is to use an imperfect term, but it’s one I rather like due to the dismissiveness with which it is nearly always used. You’ve only to break down the term itself to see how perfect it is when applied to Netflix’s sports content library. Opera comes from opera, of course and more specifically to the way in which feelings are magnified beyond the everyday to tell a larger truth. Soap comes from the commercials that used to interrupt these outsize emotional moments to sell products like laundry soap to housewives. With the introduction of Netflix’s ad-tier, the only real difference is in who the soap is being sold to (it’s men).

Starting Five’s cast of characters will be familiar to us all. The aging legend who has one more in him (Lebron), the new phenom on the block (Edwards), the class clown who needs to learn gravity (Butler), the heir apparent who hasn’t measured up (Tatum), and the nepo baby trying to forge his own path (Sabonis). Over the course of ten episodes, the story of the 2023-2024 NBA season unfolds. The narrative threads won’t be unfamiliar to an existing fan; Edwards is positioned as Lebron’s successor; Tatum goes from “does he actually have a championship in him” to champion; Butler fucks around and gets injured, dooming his team’s chances. Sabonis is the only real outlier in terms of narrative. It’s not clear what the show wants to do with him, as he seems like just a regular guy with a nice family who is on a mid team, but maybe that’s the point and he’s the regular person’s stand-in.

A documentary owes a debt to truth. It is about getting underneath the story we already know about something and giving us the real one, and there are many great sports documentaries that do this. But Starting Five and its brothers are honest enough to admit (by omission) that the truth doesn’t really matter to them (see for example no mention of Ant Edwards bullying a woman into getting an abortion). The NBA, like all major sports leagues, is about putting on a show. The outcomes may not be predetermined, but the league keeps a tight grip on what’s said and what’s not. The negative narratives in Starting Five are the same things the commentators, podcasters, and journalists have been saying for the last year and more: Lebron might be getting too old, Jimmy Butler isn’t serious enough, Ant Edwards is immature, Jayson Tatum may be a failure (Sabonis is too… nice?). Starting Five acknowledges those narratives and then maneuvers its players through a positive arc: Lebron isn’t too old after all, Jimmy may be silly but he’s also gritty, Ant’s on the right path, Tatum can win a championship after all (Sabonis married a Laker girl?). It’s an advertorial for the league and a very effective one.

To a basketball-curious person, I’d recommend this show in an instant. To a casual fan, or someone who just likes these guys, it’s an incredibly pleasant watch. It’s the world you want to live in if you just want to enjoy a performance. It won’t appeal to anyone who wants to dig underneath, or who would rather see less camera-ready players in the spotlight (a shadow Starting Five starring Giannis Antetokounmpo, Draymond Greene, Ja Morant, Dillon Brooks, and James Harden would be really fucking interesting and will absolutely never happen). But if you want to be told a story with knights and princesses and villains and daring deeds, you need look no farther. And that, I think is why I love the sport. It makes me feel like a child again, cheering for simple things.