ESPN tonight will air its latest "30 for 30" documentary, "This Was The XFL," and director Charlie Ebersol recently appeared on "OTL" to discuss the film. Ebersol's father, former NBC Sports Chair Dick Ebersol, was co-Founder of the XFL, along with WWE Chair & CEO Vince McMahon. ESPN's Bob Ley said the film is a "marvelous ride through history, a visual delight." Ley: “We remember the XFL, 16 years after it burst as a supernova on the American screen. The XFL, with that holy trinity of television: Football, violence and sex. Armed with ample doses of each, you simply couldn’t go wrong." Charlie Ebersol, asked to describe what the XFL was to a person who had no idea what the league was, said, "I would tell them to look at a Trump rally." Ebersol added, "It was the perfect marriage of marketing and big thoughts without great execution." Ebersol said the film he wanted to make was about the friendship between his father and McMahon, and he said what people "aren't going to realize is how deep this friendship is and how that friendship is the only reason that the league both came together and then went away because it really relied heavily on them being close friends for my dad to be able to say to Vince, 'This is dead and we need to walk away before it gets any worse'" (“OTL,” ESPN, 1/31).
RING MASTERS: Ebersol said the "biggest reason" he was the right person to do the film was because of his relationship with McMahon. Ebersol: "Without exception, everyone who’s seen the film and given me notes on it has said the single most shocking part of the whole thing was this was a Vince no one had ever seen. Keep in mind, the guy has agreed to do zero interviews about anything ever with anyone. For him to sit for a couple of hours for an interview with me and then subsequently, I had him and my dad have dinner after they both finished their interviews, and they sat and talked the XFL with each other for the first time. It ended up being this very, very powerful moment between the two men that’s really emotional" (EW.com, 1/30). The WALL STREET JOURNAL's Jason Gay noted Dick Ebersol "sounded ecstatic about what his son had pulled off." He said, "I don’t think I’ve ever been as proud of anything I’ve ever done in my life as I was of Charlie. He told the story straight" (WSJ.com, 1/12).
REVIEWS ARE IN: AWFUL ANNOUNCING's Ben Koo reviewed the documentary and wrote it is "fun, fast, interesting, and entertaining and revisits something colorful that mostly has faded away in our collective memory." It is a "great topic," but the film "marched forward at a pace you rarely see in any '30 for 30' or even an aggressively planned pub crawl." The film "definitely could have been stretched out another 30 minutes or perhaps even longer," as there are "so many major developments in the league’s history and additional context" that was not included. The documentary also is a "bit too polite and not introspective enough" when compared to "Small Potatoes: Who Killed the USFL?" One of the things that made that "30 for 30" film "one of the better installments" was its "ability to squarely point the finger at Donald Trump for the league’s failing." Koo: "We don't get that firm specificity as to what went wrong and who is to blame here other than the football was terrible" (AWFULANNOUNCING.com, 2/1). SI.com's Jack Dickey wrote to Ebersol’s credit, he "accurately paints the failure" authored by his father (SI.com, 1/19). On Long Island, Neil Best wrote the subject matter was "more than enough to fill an entertaining documentary" (NEWSDAY.com, 1/23).
