Can You Really Tell The Story Of The Tampa Bay Buccaneers in Just 10 Hours?

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers have commissioned a 10-part docuseries on themselves and Amazon Prime has agreed to air it, starting on December 11. Even by the debased standards that apply to vanity sports documentaries, the question of "why" springs immediately to mind, and then it just keeps springing there, with a manic gleam in its eye and a knife between its teeth. But "no, and not even if the alternative was coal mining" is too easy a response.

Normally the question of "why" would be a rhetorical for a documentary. Every misbegotten feature film is made for the same reason, which is to see if there's some money to be made off of it, but a documentary film would ordinarily serve to document some notable or useful thing. But sports documentaries are by and large a vanity buy, now, and a sprawling history of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as a subject lands somewhere near "the comprehensive history of Andorra" as these things go—a very niche buy indeed, which is maybe giving it way too much credit and not nearly enough spittle.