Sports documentaries are a personal favourite, but Last Chance U is a rare example of a sport's true colours shown through big budget filmmaking. Set in the collegiate American football setting of small town America, this show highlights everything inherently wrong with the system and the mindset that goes as standard with the sport. Being premier recruitment colleges for those denied a chance in the major leagues (sometimes through bad luck, sometimes through bad choices), they are breeding grounds for dangerous mentalities in children who genuinely know no better.
It starts with the coaches; men who have lived with the sport their entire lives, but who don't always understand the way teenagers think. On top of this, their academic teachers toil to get them almost unattainable grades to give them that slim chance of success, constantly fighting against a tide of setbacks and resistance. Finally, the students - arrogant, boisterous and over-pressured athletes thrown into stardom from the minute they discovered their talent, now deluded into thinking they are untouchable future stars.
The stupidity is that the cameras only enable these kids to act like superstars. Suddenly they have their inner belief of stardom reinforced by a full film crew following their every move - regardless of whether they win or lose. It's even made clear on the show: every single one believes they are going to make it to the NFL, but only the luckiest ever even get close. The teachers know it and try to make it clear, but nothing will dissuade these students of their dreams. You watch it with mixed feelings of pity and anger; they genuinely know no better, but they act so poorly they must know they deserve nothing from these people who give everything to help them in ways they don't appreciate. The few students who do eventually cross the line and are kicked from school all pretend to repent when the cameras are pointed at them, but the follow-up interviews make it clear some of them are just genuinely bad people.
Whilst this makes entertaining television with its various twists, it also presents the damage this society perpetuates. Whole communities suffer: these isolated towns devote their funds entirely to sportsmen they've never met, sacrificing all other academic students and their pursuits. Moreover, these students then push themselves through potentially life-threatening injuries, convinced they can handle "only another concussion" or a "small loss of feeling in their legs" from being hit repeatedly.
By the close of each season, you wonder if any of those you have seen grow throughout the show will be around for many more years. Some of them cannot resist the vicious cycles of crime and delinquency they have grown up in; others simply can't get the grades needed to take the next step. At the end of the day, the schools only care about the score after 60 minutes.
