Relatively Cheap Sports Documentaries Growing In Popularity As TV Programing

The success of ESPN's “30 for 30” has "created a growing industry on television for sports documentaries," and their proliferation and profitability "has quickly brought a niche market into the mainstream," according to Richard Sandomir of the N.Y. TIMES. Director Jonathan Hock, whose ESPN credits include “Of Miracles and Men” and “Survive and Advance,” said, "This is a golden age for sports documentaries." Sandomir noted sports documentaries have "been around for decades, but they were more often special events, like Bud Greenspan’s Olympic films, or occasional television or theatrical presentations." When ESPN introduced “30 for 30” in '09, it was a "thunderclap in the industry." ESPN "became the dominant force, and since then, the ambitions of ESPN and HBO, which once dominated the genre by producing four films a year, have shifted drastically." HBO Sports "shuttered its in-house documentary unit" in November '11 and "struggles to maintain its relevance in a transformed market in which many networks, including Showtime, Epix, CBS and Fox Sports 1, are active at various levels." NBC Sports is "close to announcing the formation of an internal unit to produce four documentaries a year" starting in '16. Documentaries are a "bargain to produce -- ESPN’s cost about $500,000 each -- when compared with the soaring prices of live sports rights, and they can be repeated for years." Showtime on Wednesday will debut "Dean Smith," the latest project for former HBO Sports President Ross Greenburg. The film is a collaborative effort written by Steve Stern and directed and edited by George Roy, whose HBO work "earned them eight Sports Emmys." Meanwhile, HBO Sports President Ken Hershman said that the company "had not abandoned sports documentaries but wanted to create a 'different space' for experimentation, rather than have a largely in-house group of filmmakers" (N.Y. TIMES, 3/23).