The most watched global “sports” event this weekend is the final episode of Netflix’s Countdown, a “reality” boxing series climaxing with the “bout” between Jake Paul and Mike Tyson in Dallas on Saturday AEDT.
No more shout quotes, but you get the drift. The contest – almost real, almost a sport – is not made-for-TV so much as made-as-TV. Netflix has taken its successful sports documentary genre (Drive to Survive, The Last Dance, etc) a step further by extending into streamed coverage of a live event.
Just like real sport, the final episode will deliver Paul and Tyson tens of millions of dollars, Netflix a few zeroes more, and eyeballs as far as eyeballs can see. A commercial success, Countdown is riding a rethink of how to “do” sports. This model is being described as the future of sports coverage.
Leave aside the stupidity of the spectacle. A 58-year-old fighting a 27-year-old belongs in the shadiest corner of sideshow alley, if not criminal courts. Leave aside boxing’s acceleration towards extinction, even on its own terms. Neither contestant is a boxer in any meaningful sense. Paul does have a world ranking in the cruiserweight division: he’s No.93. His real profession is YouTubing, in which he has 20.7 million followers.
Leave aside the sad and often criminal tale of Tyson’s life. He’s not a boxer any more. But he is not the only aged man with a history of violence against women to be top of the American pops.
Leave aside all the horrible wrongness, all the Freudian and racist undertones. These, after all, are what makes Countdown a ratings winner and a sports goldmine.
The ’Flix is in: Mike Tyson speaks ahead of his bout against Jake Paul.Credit: Getty Images
That’s a lot to leave aside before you find why this monstrosity could be viewed, seriously, as a template for the future.
As a full convergence of sport and entertainment, Countdown is a successor not to boxing, nor to the other sports where Netflix goes behind the scenes, but to Vince McMahon’s WWE. The pantomime is updated but the crossover between outrage and theatre – Tyson’s criminal past is all a part of the show – is the same recipe as the one McMahon parlayed into a fortune. It was WWE that rebirthed a bankrupt New York property con artist as a TV star, before The Apprentice. Pretend fights, real consequences.
It’s going to be interesting, in sports not to mention the rest of the benighted planet, to see what we are counting down to, not just this weekend but in coming seasons. Television drama needs a fitting end that fulfils third-act scripting conventions.
Boxing, with its record on integrity, is the obvious place to start the fix, but how long before the scriptwriters (or scriptwriting AI) on another behind-the-scenes show insist on having a hand in the outcome? How long before viewer satisfaction data – not training, skill, or the glorious uncertainty – begins to determine sporting results? If the Netflix model is the future of sport, the final episode can’t be left to chance.
“In the packaging of today’s sport, the past has become a bludgeon to knock the present out.”
A washout, a blowout or some other anti-climax is one of the possibilities of sport, but it is not acceptable in televised drama. At the end of the season, JR Ewing or Mr Burns has to go down, and we have to be desperate to sign up next time to find out who shot him. Given how highly the series has rated, Saturday’s bout will inevitably lead to the commissioning of a second series, Countdowner: The rematch.
For a fight, Countdown needed a brand-name entertainer, and if Tyson was it, then the future of sport is the past. Spare a thought for the young. Not only are they devoured by the undead zombie of house prices, but sport is coming to eat them too.
Nostalgia already casts a lengthening shadow over sports coverage. Audiences are fed nostalgia, whether it’s their own memory lane or someone else’s. Older people’s spending power and streaming technology have combined to make nostalgic trips accessible. If the current Wallabies can’t complete a grand slam, it’s easy to slip into the warm bath of watching Mark Ella and Campo doing it in 1984.
Nostalgia-as-entertainment inflects cricket commentary almost as a rule. Today’s commentators fill time with personal anecdotes. I’m as sucked in by nostalgia as anyone, but by comparison, did Richie Benaud ever contextualise the game by droning on about the 1958-59 Ashes? Bill Lawry, when prodded on air to reminisce his playing days, snapped a reply to the effect of, “Not interested – I’m watching what’s happening here and now”.
A weakness for the past, for those of us who suffer from it (hands up), ought at least to be acknowledged for what it is: a weakness. We should ask for the young to indulge us just for a moment. Instead, in the packaging of today’s sport, the past has become a bludgeon to knock the present out. Old anecdotes reinforce this power play: things now are not as good as they were. The old man in his golf cart has escaped, put on a suit, and imposed his weakness upon the world.
Reactionary, gleefully up-yours and proud of its hormonal excretions, Countdown is sports and entertainment’s best offer at making sense of these times we live in.
While Countdown might seem to be a next step in how sports are covered and funded, it shows how the behind-the-scenes series is already transitioning into scripted performance. Eddie Jones, in Stan’s series on the Wallabies’ 2023 World Cup campaign, came across not as a villain so much as a fake, putting on an act for the cameras.
Increasingly, behind the scenes you find just another scene (looking at you, Nick Kyrgios in Break Point). To get beyond this impasse, behind the scenes has to get into the arena where, like a sports mutation of Heisenberg’s Principle, by observing something it also manipulates it.
We don’t have to spell out who’s really being manipulated.
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