Be honest, the most interesting part of reality TV has never been about winning. What people really want to see is some pain, whether it’s getting eviscerated by judges, eating kangaroo testicles, or pretending to be a cat and licking milk from the Coronation Street lady’s cupped hands. It’s no surprise that the real star of Netflix’s new rugby series Six Nations: Full Contact is not Ireland, which won the grand slam last year, or France, which pushed them so hard, but Italy, which lost it all. They played five matches and finished last.
The series ends – spoilers! – their head coach Kieran Crowley reflects on the fact that he will most likely be out of a job. A headline adds: Yes, just a few months later the Italian Rugby Federation decided not to renew his contract. Crowley had already started with the Honda Heat in Japan’s Rugby League One, but watching Full Contact you wonder if he missed out on the job. Some enterprising producer should have already commissioned a travel series featuring Crowley and his sidekick, former Taranaki dairy farmer Neil Barnes.
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“I’m too old for this shit,” Crowley says wearily as he watches his team suffer yet another heartbreaking defeat. The New Zealander accepts Italy’s brutal results with great grace, partly because Barnes trained like him there. interpreter. Barnes doesn’t speak any Italian, but he still has a knack for translating the nuances of Crowley’s mood into language anyone can understand: “For God’s sake,” “shoot that bastard,” with an immortal reference. To Ange Capuozzo, Italy’s only star player, “give the ball to Capu, whatever her name is, she is very fast.”
At least you know Barnes isn’t showing off. There’s an authenticity to the scenes in Italy that’s missing from the scenes featuring some other teams; I think it’s because the team has more access to Netflix. The other team that allows the team backstage is Scotland, so we can see the players’ faces when they find out if they have been selected. This is not a coincidence. Scotland and Italy were the two smallest rugby-playing nations of the six and were hoping to make the most of Netflix’s promise that the series would bring in new viewers.
The Welsh were more mysterious and after the opening rounds the English seemed to have all but disappeared from the series. It’s a loss because they both had their own stories; Steve Borthwick had just taken over as England manager and Warren Gatland, who had just staged his own comeback, had to deal with the threat of a players’ strike midway through the tournament. All we actually see in both are a handful of platitudes and a series of painfully awkward staged conversations between Gatland and his wife Trudi about what he’s going through.
The French, meanwhile, are completely and unmistakably themselves. “Rugby is an art of passing, with arabesques, parabolas and the stadium screaming in unison,” head coach Fabien Galthié says at one point. It’s a shame we don’t get a little more from this aspect of the sport. The documentary makers instead chose to repeatedly emphasize how physically demanding it was. Arabesque? Parabolas? Are these the players playing in Beziers’ second row?
For example, it’s one thing to hear Finn Russell describe himself as “like the Messi of rugby”, but since you’ve got him talking, wouldn’t it be nice to hear him explain what that really means when he’s out and about? field? Russell gets a lot of screen time, but you don’t come close to knowing what was actually going on in his head for 80 minutes by the end of the series, why he knew how to make that pass long or how he was able to see that kick. happened. Similarly, the series manages to clock in at over six hours without even a single mention of the attack or the squad leaving, let alone trying to explain what it’s like to be in the middle of a match during a Test match.
This is strange considering these things are a big part of what makes rugby union unique. Instead, the series tries to sell the game by interviewing some of the players (Andrew Porter, Stuart Hogg, Ellis Genge, Seb Negri, Gaël Fickou) about their backstories. But the truth is that of all team sports, rugby union is one of the least amenable to this type of celebrity-focused approach. As Townsend puts it, it’s “team play at its finest”; The story of a game, whether victory or defeat, never belongs to a single player, and the characters of the teams are more important than the male or female characters. in them.
The sport reeks of a lack of confidence, as if it thinks it needs to sell itself to a new audience by pretending it’s something else. By the end of the series the show had solved this problem and the strongest episodes were the ones where it really became clear what defeat meant, especially for Italy and Scotland. A second series could be magnificent if it is commissioned, if it is a little more confident about itself and the stories it is trying to tell, and if, as Barnes told Crowley, those involved “have the guts” to devote themselves to it.