Jon Bois and Alex Rubenstein, creators of "The History of the Seattle Mariners" and "The History of the Atlanta Falcons," present the story of the Minnesota Vikings, a franchise whose truly unique and amazing story we've been waiting to tell for years. This seven-part Dorktown docies traces the Vikings' history from 1961 all the way to the present day.
"Here's a graph of every director who's ever made a documentary, plotted based on their greatness, consistency, and innovation. Up near the top of the graph, you'll see names like Ken Burns, Frederick Wiseman, and Errol Morris, all of them legends in the field. All of them with the kinds of unique filmmaking styles usually reserved for narrative directors. All of them redefined what a documentary could be. For a while it felt like this kind of documentarian was a thing of the past. In an era where the Academy's definition of the "best" documentaries are mostly talking head interviews and archival footage, we may not ever have a singular documentarian again."
*One more dot appears on the graph*
*The camera pans over to a grainy photo*
"And then came Jon Bois"
How dare Bois attempt to make me feel bad for Brett Favre
ok finished. now i've seen it all. I think the football ones will always resonate with me slightly less but this might be the best presentation Bois has attempted yet. the final look back over the landscape, over history, through the eyes of Kirk fucking Cousins? magnifico
Kind of a compromise between the Mariners and the Falcons. With the former we learn that winning isn't the only thing, that sports are about moments and characters. With the latter we learn that sometimes the universe is just determined to be against us, but we nonetheless can find some solace in the ingenuity with which it screws us over.
The Vikings tell us that, though sports are full of stories and moments, spectacular successes and equally spectacular failures, our efforts to form them into a coherent narrative, as we did with the Mariners and Falcons, are ultimately fruitless. Sometimes stuff just happens, and arranging it all in a chart doesn't always help make sense of it.
That said, a…
“Well, everyone knows the Super Bowl is the end-all-be-all criteria for a successful NFL team. But what my docies presupposes is — maybe it isn’t?”
I realize I’m prematurely reviewing this, but I hope it’s not a spoiler to say that the Minnesota Vikings do not win a Super Bowl in this one, folks. Maybe you know that from being a longtime football fan, maybe you know that from seeing the “time vs. wins vs. Super Bowl droughts” chart underpinning this entire saga, seeing Jon pointedly note every year’s winner, and understanding that the writing’s on the wall here.
The Minnesota Vikings are, paradoxically, the winningest football team to have never “won it'' — which makes them the perfect subject…
A proper review:
“But that’s a story for another time,” Jon Bois intoned in describing the Minnesota Vikings’ inability to win the Super Bowl in The History of the Atlanta Falcons, and within those seven words lay a tale of humanity, stupidity, goofiness, hilarity, and what makes us us that could only have been properly teased out by Them Dorktown Boys in this spiritual sequel to that magnum opus. Over nine plus hours of their trademark computer graphics and droll commentary, Bois and Alex Rubenstein not only take us through a franchise with some of the most famous wins and even more of the most famous losses the league has ever seen, but tie in our ways of life and how…
where this succeeds to a much greater degree than the other history series is in defining the team’s identity — the laser focused character study of captain ahab applied to a franchise across its entire history. the vikings as the tragic heroes of american sport; perpetual winners who can never quite reach the mountaintop; a team that simply refuses to be bad and yet seems incapable, outside of a few glittering, beautiful moments, of delivering the catharsis its fans so desperately need. it makes for a much different tone than anything bois and co have done before. you sort of feel for the mariners and falcons in their perpetual strangeness and ineptitude, but these are ultimately bozo teams that have…
episode 1
big day for people who are insufferable about their niche interests
Like Falcons this takes a long time to reach its central idea but where that still finds a way to work, Bois’s conclusion that there’s no real lesson to be learned here just doesn’t have the dramatic impact of something like the colossal failure of that team or the perpetual underdogs that are the Mariners. He’s still finding all these lovely little stories throughout this thing but they’re only ever micro narratives. There’s no coda here to justify all the nearly endless details that have come before. Just never coheres in the way it should. Luckily, Bois is as formally exciting as ever so this is immensely watchable, but I wish I could’ve got as invested in this story as he seems to be.
aw dang it
rip bud grant 💜
Placeholder post before the full seven part series is online: I truly love that Jon Bois made a throwaway "but that's for another time" line about the Vikings in his History of the Atlanta Falcons doc, and then came back to it immediately, like if Tarantino actually paid off Vernita Green's daughter seeking revenge against The Bride
I'm never going to complain about a new long-form Bois/Rubenstein project. They're likely the foremost documentarians working today, and nerdy sports fans like myself are tremendously lucky that they've put out so many thoughtful, ionate works that help to translate what we love about sports to a wider audience. Their stat-driven, chart-heavy approach results in some clever and wholly unique formal techniques that help to elevate these stories far beyond your standard sports documentary. These attributes come pre-packaged with every Bois/Rubenstein collaboration, though, and give it a baseline level of high quality especially compared to competing documentaries. The fun part of each new release is discerning the duo's angle on the teams they select. With The History of the Seattle…
