I received perhaps the most unexpected text a few weeks ago: “Did you give Netflix permission to use SANDCAST in the new Brett Favre documentary?”
You can go ahead and file that under things I never thought I’d hear in my life.
The episode of SANDCAST that had been used, for a few seconds, in the Untold documentary, The Fall of Favre, was from March of 2022, when Brett Favre and Southern Miss head beach volleyball coach Shawn Taylor came on to talk Southern Miss Beach Volleyball, where Favre’s daughter, Breleigh, played, and where his own star was born as a gunslinging quarterback.
The clip is 16 seconds long, with Favre saying: “One thing I can brag about with our facility as far as the niceness and the amenities, it may not be seen as one of the best in the country, but it’s the best in the country.”
Taylor then adds: “Brett and his wife Deanna have played a big role in helping us get those facilities.”
I don’t feel much need to weigh in on what happened next, where Favre was, as ESPN wrote, “one of 38 defendants named in a civil lawsuit filed by the Mississippi Department of Human Services (MDHS) seeking to recoup Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) funds that were diverted to the rich and powerful. A state audit found that at least $77 million in welfare funds was misspent.”
After watching the documentary, you’d be surprised to learn that he hasn’t actually been charged with anything, and I am no judge or jury, nor do I desire or pretend to be one in this case. But to answer my friend’s question (and several others who thought it hilarious that a beach volleyball podcast made a documentary about one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time): No, Netflix didn’t ask permission. Not that I really care, but it would have been nice to give Taylor, a man I like a great deal and who put on an excellent event for the 2025 season-opener, a heads up that something was on the way about his program.
I actually don’t even have a Netflix account, so I had no idea there was a Brett Favre documentary being made, much less that our little podcast, shot with embarrassingly blurry video – we’ve since remedied that, thank goodness — would not only cross the streaming giant’s radar, but make it into the documentary itself. Before kids, when I had time for things like movies and documentaries, I used to watch nearly every sports-related documentary that Netflix produced, and I’ve loved most every Untold I’d previously watched.
This is not one of them.
Think what you will of Favre. If your only exposure to him is the documentary, you will undoubtedly have a negative opinion of him, and that’s fair. I have no desire to either pile on or defend him. He is, like all of us, a flawed man. He lives a life, unlike almost all of us, with a publicity and microscope few humans have ever experienced, and so those flaws – and the magnitude of them – are magnified to the extreme. I don’t think this documentary would have been made if it didn’t have his high-profile attachment to it; government corruption and the diversion of funds for questionable purposes seems to be about as common as speeding. I’ve never met him – I was overseas competing when Tri Bourne and Savvy Simo recorded the episode – so I don’t really feel the need to have an opinion on him one way or the other.
But I have been in the media for almost multiple decades now, and I studied at a respected journalism school at the University of Maryland.
From a journalistic standpoint, the documentary is an embarrassment, as one-sided of a hit piece as I’ve seen in quite some time, perhaps ever. I’ve seen more balanced takes on O.J. There was not a single dissenting voice, nobody there to explain why Favre hasn’t yet been charged, despite the overwhelming evidence and storytelling presented by Netflix. There was an agenda there, and it wasn’t difficult to see what that agenda was: take down Brett Favre.
They did a fine job of that, though in so doing, Untold, to me, took down itself. Here was a series of compelling documentaries that threw in entertainment plays here and there but had mostly told excellent stories.
To me, it ruined itself with the Fall of Favre, even if it did use our little podcast for our 16 seconds of fame.
Opinion pieces are totally fine. I’ve written plenty. So, even, are one-sided pieces. Wrote plenty of those, too, though they invariably fall in the puff piece category; I’d rather build up than tear down. But a one-sided hit-piece masquerading as a journalistic enterprise in a documentary is where The Fall of Favre lost me.
Had Netflix asked for permission, I undoubtedly would have given it to them. Now that I see how it’s been used, I probably would have taken it back.
