'Texas 6' Review
Just as Die Hard was hardly the first great ’80s action movie yet became the template for countless enclosed-space-thrillers, Netflix’s Last Chance U was far from the first football docuseries yet now it feels like every week sees the arrival of a new, very minor wrinkle on that formula.
It’s a formula that goes something like: 40 percent tough-but-loving coach with an appetite for colorful obscenities and an ooey-gooey emotional center; 40 percent players including (but not limited to) the established superstar battling injuries and the out-of-nowhere scrub who becomes a star; and 20 percent portrait of an inevitably struggling community that may or may not live or die for the team.
The Bottom LineA little thin, but still capable of satisfying your Thanksgiving Day high-school football appetite.
Air date: Nov 26, 2020
In 2020 alone, we’ve had Last Chance U with cheerleaders (Netflix’s Cheer), Last Chance U with inner-city high-school players (HBO’s The Cost of Winning) and, still at the pinnacle, Last Chance U with junior college football players (Netflix’s Last Chance U).
Let’s welcome CBS All Access to the mix with the eight-part documentary series Texas 6, which is Last Chance U for Texas six-man football — though I think it would probably reach a bigger audience if I tried saying that it’s actually a nonfiction spin on Friday Night Lights as well.
Directed by Jared L. Christopher, Texas 6 is set in Strawn, Texas, population 676. The class of 2020 at the local high school has 16 members, but the elementary school’s first grade class is only four. Way back in the day, the Greyhounds played 11-man football, but as the town shrunk the school dropped to the six-man game, a wide-open variant played on an 80-yard field and characterized by offensive explosiveness.
Among schools playing six-man, Strawn is already on the small side, playing Division II ball, but under the watch of Coach Dewaine Lee, they’ve won consecutive state championships and they’re eying a third, despite heavy turnover on both sides of the ball. At the town’s only restaurant, the old-timers sit around speculating on how the Greyhounds will perform against a stacked schedule, a local pastime that extends to Lee’s weekly screening of game film for any members of the community who want to drop by and kibitz.
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The genre pieces are all in place here: Lee yells and swears — “cusses,” if we want to be regionally specific — and lives to make his players barf in exhausting conditioning drills, but there’s nothing he won’t do for his team and his town, including dressing up in elaborate Halloween costumes to scare small children. The squad’s star is pint-sized running back/defensive back J.W. Montgomery, all-state despite running a generous 5’6″ and 145 pounds. The quarterback, Blaze Duncan, seems like a good kid, but does he lack grit and is he more interested in pursuing a career as a chef? In addition to the community’s passion for the team and the chance for a three-peat, the season is dedicated to a recently graduated star who died in a tragic accident. There’s a lot of material here and, for the most part, it pushes the buttons you want pushed by an underdog sports doc.
The impact of Friday Night Lights is acknowledged in the first episode only to emphasize that the passion in Strawn is 100-times what one might experience in Odessa. The aesthetic influence is equally strong and condensed. It’s hard to tell if farming/ranching schedules in Strawn are the reason nearly every team workout or event is taking place at either dawn or dusk, but whatever the explanation, cinematographer Jordan C. Terrell is the leading beneficiary of those perfectly lit mornings and evenings, as well as the inevitable nighttime games. Paying even more clear homage is Eric Gillette and Tom Polce’s score, which surely boasts Explosions in the Sky among its obvious influences.
Still, influences and templates aside, there’s enough different here to make Texas 6 an easy watch, especially with some episodes barely running over 30 minutes.
Strawn, with its mixture of ranching and dairy jobs, is a different sort of blue-collar community. Kids on shows with this formula tend to dream of the NFL or of four-year colleges. Six-man football isn’t a pipeline to professional sports nor 11-man college teams, and that’s not the life these kids are living anyway. The agricultural sciences class is Strawn’s marquee offering, with its lessons in animal husbandry and livestock maintenance. When the players show off their athletic laurels, the trophies and medals are inevitably displayed proudly next to plaques for disciplines like “Swine Proficiency.”
There’s a racial dynamic in Strawn and on the football team, which appears to be nearly half Latinx, that Texas 6 is struggling to depict through the five episodes sent to critics. The Latinx players receive markedly less screen time, their parents are nearly invisible and if there’s an older Spanish-speaking generation in Strawn — and there may not be — it’s absent.
Two things to keep in mind: I can’t speak to where the focus goes in the last three episodes and I definitely can’t speak to how much or little access the filmmakers got to certain families. All I can speak to is the oddness of multiple episodes dedicated to Blaze and his culinary dreams when several of the team’s other featured players have received only a couple talking-head segments at most. After five episodes, I felt some fatigue with JW and Blaze and untapped interest in players like Lorenzo Garcia and Marco Lopez. There’s a story about the town, its economy and its demographic shifts that is not being told here. Yet.
CBS All Access is premiering Texas 6 on Thanksgiving, a day that for many people is about high-school football games as much as turkey. In that respect, what I’ve seen is satisfying and affable, if not quite nuanced enough to be essential. But maybe it will build to that in later episodes.
Episodes premiere Thursdays on CBS All Access starting on November 26.
