Jon Bois is our greatest working sports documentarian. No matter the subject — hopeless team, peripheral figure, or strange one-off event — Bois treats each as the most important story ever told. It gives his films a weight they may not deserve otherwise, and it often leads to great pathos — allowing you to experience a catharsis you wouldn’t unless you were already a fan of the given team or player.
The problem with Bois’s approach is that sometimes you’re going to hit a subject that actually doesn’t need to be treated as the most important story ever told because there really isn’t that much story to tell. That’s what holds his new docuseries “The History of the Minnesota Vikings” back from being among the best he’s ever produced. Here, Bois wants to explore “the great storytellers of football,” a team that creates and plays into great myth just as their historical namesake implies they would. That isn’t a compelling enough thesis to warrant a roughly nine hour docuseries.
Bois has always seemed more interested in the personal stories, the random tiny details that, when linked together, create a more meaningful narrative tapestry. There is no shortage of that here — my personal favorite being Steve Stonebreaker drinking (half) a yard of martini and waking up at the top of the Minnesota Sheraton-Ritz Hotel escalator — but unlike his other team history docs on the Seattle Mariners or the Atlanta Falcons or even his “Captain Ahab” series on Toronto Blue Jays pitcher Dave Stieb, this series never feels like it coalesces.
There’s nothing to build towards, no climax that brings the entire history of the Vikings together into one moment. In the Falcons doc, it’s Super Bowl LI, which represents the ultimate disappointment by a team that as been nothing but for its fans and city. In the Dave Stieb doc, it’s finally the pitcher finally catching his white whale, throwing a no-hitter after obsessively coming so close so many times. Here, it’s the juxtaposition of the euphoria brought by the Minneapolis Miracle in 2018 and a Kirk Cousins conservative checkdown on 4th and 8 to get knocked out of last season’s playoffs. Bois tries to bring it all together as a representation that the Vikings are the NFL’s storytellers, but it feels weak as a finale given the series length. The Mariners doc ends in a similar anti-climax, but there it plays as a cruel joke. Seattle finally looks like it might take that leap to the next level, but the team is doomed to irrelevance. Now, the Vikings story seems derivative, unworthy of a comprehensive study when there are plenty of other franchises and communities with more drama to offer.
Formally, the docuseries still offers Bois’s classic collection of charts and graphs floating in limbo — a trademark for his docs but a choice that seems like the perfect metaphor for the Minnesota Vikings, who are never bad but can never get to the top of the mountain. Bois keeps the “camera” constantly moving, assuring that the film is never dull to look at, but the pace is kept methodical enough that it never distracts from the stories Bois is clearly more interested in. You might think this would make the series better suited to an article, book, or podcast. But Bois has proven as master of minute visual comedy, generating big laughs from the subtlest cuts, pans, and zooms that compliment his typical dry and sarcastic narration. At this point, it’s a formula, but it’s a formula that works and still feels fresh in the world of sports documentaries that are typically the same talking head interview intercut with highlight reel footage format.
Several times throughout “The History of the Minnesota Vikings,” Bois tries to reach for more, something outside of football that he can use the franchise’s story to tell. There’s the activism of Alan Page, the (at times contradictory) progressivism of Bud Grant, the Vikings’ and the NFL’s relationship to the Black Lives Matter movement, but these all feel like detours rather than what the documentary is actually about — football and storytelling. Though it still works far better than most sports docs that focus primarily on their sport, it feels like something is missing compared to Bois’s other work.
