The 8 best sports TV shows of all time
‘Heated Rivalry’ is just the latest show to use a sports hook to win audiences
Competitive sports are a reliable foundation on which to build solid comedy and drama. The great thing about these eight superb shows is that you don’t need to know much of anything at all about sports to enjoy them.
‘Sports Night’ (1998-2000)
Creator Aaron Sorkin’s short-lived but beloved cult classic followed the hosts and producers of a fictional nightly sports recap show trying to compete with ESPN’s pioneering “SportsCenter.” Josh Charles starred in a breakout role as the show’s co-host Dan Rydell, alongside Casey McCall (Peter Krause), as the pair and executive producer Dana Whitaker (Felicity Huffman) chase the ESPN ratings behemoth.
Looking back, it is truly hard to believe that ABC saddled the series and its witty, fast-moving dialogue with a laugh track in its first season. A show “populated by characters whose jobs define who they are,” it was “full of walk-and-talks, clipboards and very important meetings,” said Ciara Moloney at Paste Magazine. The result was “unadulterated Sorkin — with all of his strengths and none of his weaknesses.” (Prime Video)
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‘Friday Night Lights’ (2006-2011)
Adapted from the hit 2004 film, “Friday Night Lights” is an intimate look at a Texas high school football team and one of the last truly magnificent network television shows before the streaming era gave us the concept of “prestige TV.” Kyle Chandler is the show’s moral center as Coach Eric Taylor, whose team is the pride of fictional Dillon, Texas. Connie Britton plays his wife, Tami, and the strength of the pair’s performances covered up for some uneven acting from the high school ensemble. The first season of the show was “great in the way of a poem or painting, great in the way of art with a single obsessive creator who doesn’t have to consult with a committee and has months or years to go back and agonize over line breaks and the color red,” said Virginia Heffernan at The New York Times. (Prime Video)
‘The League’ (2009-2015)
Fantasy sports are an enormous, if niche, industry, and FX’s “The League” might be the only sports show ever to focus on a group of friends and their sometimes relationship-wrecking obsession with this odd little hobby. Mark Duplass stars as Pete, the reigning champ of the titular fantasy football league when the show starts, and Katie Aselton is a consistent standout as football savant Jenny, who competes in the league with her husband, Kevin (Stephen Rannazzisi).
Featuring “time-honored elements of screwball comedy,” the best humor in this fantastic series comes not from the league but “from equal opportunity humiliation that is the basis of their friendships,” said David Wiegand at SFGate. Like the amoral gang in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” no one in “The League” ever grows or learns — and that’s part of the fun. (Disney+)
‘Eastbound & Down’ (2009-2013)
Washed-up major-leaguer Kenny Powers (Danny McBride) returns to his hometown to take a job as a substitute gym teacher after yapping his way out of professional baseball in creators Ben Best, Jody Hill and Danny McBrides’s cringe-inducing HBO Max comedy. The show’s gamble is that rather than a redemption arc, Powers’ “very public crash and burn is only the beginning of his downward spiral,” said Wired, exacerbated by him having the “capacity to care about and even love others, but he’ll sacrifice anyone if it means he can step back into the spotlight.” Harboring dreams of returning to baseball, he crashes with his brother Dustin (John Hawkes) and tries to reconnect with high school flame, April (Katy Mixon). (HBO Max)
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‘GLOW’ (2017-2019)
The 1980s-set “GLOW” gave us three superb seasons of wrestling and drama before Netflix axed it. Alison Brie is Ruth Wilder, an aspiring actress in Los Angeles whose career is going nowhere. She accepts an invitation to audition for the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling, where she is cast along with her estranged friend, Debbie Eagan (Betty Gilpin), and directed by aging film director Sam Sylvia (Marc Maron), who looks like he would rather be literally anywhere else.
But when Ruth takes on the moniker “Zoya the Destroya” she transforms her professional life and finds a path she can really throw herself into while trying to repair the damage to her relationship with Debbie. Together their exploits create a “quiet and simple masterpiece that deserves to be the most popular show on television,” said Matt Gannon at TV Wasteland. (Netflix)
‘Brockmire’ (2017-2020)
A decade after a drunken, on-air meltdown caused him to lose his job as a major league baseball announcer, Jim Brockmire (Hank Azaria) returns stateside to take a job with the woebegone, minor league Morristown Frackers. The team’s owner, Jules James (Amanda Peet), thinks that hiring the washed-up Brockmire will put her team and its rust belt town on the map.
This somewhat familiar set-up is elevated by the show’s surreal sense of humor, as well as by the foul-mouthed Brockmire’s endless antics. The show works “both as a snapshot of this aging oddity of Americana and a universal story about a washed-up person coming to terms with himself,” said Sonia Saraiya at Variety. (Netflix)
‘Ted Lasso’ (2020-)
When it debuted on August 14, 2020, the world was six months into the miserable Covid-19 pandemic, and the Apple TV+ dramedy was not only a poignant, low-stakes lifeline for millions of viewers, it also put the relatively new streamer on the map with its first big hit. Jason Sudeikis plays the title character, a U.S. college football coach who agrees to accept a bizarre job offer to manage a fictional English Premiere League soccer team, AFC Richmond.
Rebecca Welton (Hannah Waddingham) acquired the team in a divorce from her gross ex-husband and wants to run it into the ground to spite him only to find that she can’t resist Lasso’s aw-shucks charm and that his leadership sparks a renewal led by veteran star Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein). Sudeikis’ Lasso is “practically impossible not to like,” said Nick Harley at Den of Geek, and the “easy charms of a well-executed, feel-good sports story make it a breezy, low-effort watch that just about anyone can enjoy.” (Apple TV+)
‘Heated Rivalry’ (2025)
This discourse-driving hit is set during the Obama years (Yes, 2017 is now the stuff of period pieces) and depicts a secret, steamy romance between Shane Hollander (Hudson Williams) and Ilya Rozanov (Connor Storrie), two young stars who break into fictional Major League Hockey at the same time for different clubs. Early in the series, their romance takes place mostly in hotels as the pair struggle with how they might be perceived if word gets out, especially the Russian Rozanov, whose home country is considerably more dangerous for gay men than Hollander’s.
The sex is “plentiful, quite explicit, and, I’ll say it, pretty hot,” said Naomi Fry at The New Yorker. But a bigger “part of the pleasure for viewers” is the “show’s plainspoken articulation of desire, when the love that dare not speak its name finally does.” (HBO Max)
David Faris is a professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of "It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics." He's a frequent contributor to Newsweek and Slate, and his work has appeared in The Washington Post, The New Republic and The Nation, among others.