SecondLet’s be honest, the most compelling thing about reality TV is never winning. What people really want to see is a bit of pain, whether it’s being eviscerated by a judge, eating kangaroo testicles, or pretending to be a cat and licking milk from a Coronation Street woman’s hand. It’s no surprise, then, that the real star of Netflix’s new rugby series Six Nations: Total Contact isn’t Ireland, who won the Grand Slam last year, or France, who were closing in on them, but Italy, who lost them all. They played five The game ended in a draw.
The series ends – spoilers! – Their head coach Kieran Crawley reflects on the fact he is most likely to lose his job. Yes, the Italian rugby federation decided not to renew his contract just a few months later, the title added. Crawley already has a job with the Honda Heat of the Japan Rugby League, but watching Total Contact you wonder if he’s missed his calling. Some enterprising producer should surely have commissioned a travel series featuring Crowley and his assistant, former Taranaki dairy farmer Neil Barnes.
“I’m too old for this,” Crowley said wearily as he watched his team suffer another heartbreaking defeat. The New Zealander has accepted Italy’s brutal string of results with grace, partly because he has Barnes as his assistant. Interpreters. Barnes spoke no Italian at all, but still had a knack for translating the nuances of Crowley’s emotions into a language everyone else could understand, “For fuck’s sake,” “Hit that bastard ”, and, in a timeless reference to Italy’s only star player, Angie Capuozzo, “Give the ball to Capu—whatever his name is, he’s so damn fast”.
Well, at least you know Barnes isn’t putting on airs. The authenticity of the Italian scenes is lacking in some of the other teams’ scenes, I suspect because those teams gave Netflix more access. Scotland are another team that have staff working behind the scenes so we can see the players’ faces when they find out whether they have been selected. This is no coincidence. Scotland and Italy, the two smallest rugby nations of the six, hope to get the most from Netflix’s show’s promise of attracting new viewers.
Wales were more of a mystery, while England seemed to have almost completely disappeared from the series after the first round. It’s a loss because they all have their own stories. Steve Borthwick had just taken over as England manager and a newly returned Warren Gatland had to deal with the threat of a players’ strike mid-match. However, all we really see are some platitudes and a series of painfully awkward conversations between Gatland and his wife Trudy about what he’s going through.
The French, meanwhile, are completely and unquestionably themselves. “Rugby is the art of passing the ball,” coach Fabien Galthié once said, “there are arabesques, there are parabolas and at the same time the stadium is full of screams.” Unfortunately for us. Not knowing more about this side of the sport. Instead, the documentary makers choose to hammer home just how physically demanding it is. Arabesque? parabola? Are they the two guys who used to play in the second row for Beziers?
For example, it’s one thing to hear Finn Russell describe himself as “like the Messi of rugby”, but considering you’ve let him speak, listen to him explain how that actually works when he’s on the pitch. Wouldn’t it be nice to mean something? asphalt? Russell had a lot of screen time, but by the end of the series, you still had no idea what he was thinking during those 80 minutes, why he knew to throw the long ball, or how he saw that kick open. Likewise, the series didn’t even mention a scrum or a lineout in six hours, let alone attempt to explain what it’s like to be in the middle of a match in a Test match.
It’s strange because these are all part and parcel of what makes rugby league unique. Instead, the series relies on interviews with a handful of players—Andrew Porter, Stuart Hogg, Ellis Genge, Seb Negri, Gael Fickou—to get their backstories to sell the game. But the fact is that of all team sports, rugby league is one of the least suited to this celebrity-driven approach. As Townsend puts it, this is “the ultimate team game”, the story of the game never belongs to just one player, whether victory or defeat, the role of the team itself is more important than the role of the man or woman in them.
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It smells of a lack of confidence, as if the sport thinks it needs to market itself to new audiences by pretending to be something else. By the end of the series, the show has resolved this issue, and the strongest episodes are those where it’s really clear what defeat means for Italy and Scotland. A second series, if it were commissioned, would have been just a little more certain about itself and the story it was trying to tell, and if, as Barnes told Crawley, the people involved “had the guts” to commit to it, then It can be spectacular.
