"The Dynasty" doesn't seem to be for Patriots fans ... so who's the intended audience?
BOSTON -- Ostensibly, the 10-part docuseries called "The Dynasty" was made to tell the story of ... the dynasty. The reason the Patriots, Bill Belichick, Tom Brady and Robert Kraft became globally famous, divisive figures in the world of sports was rooted in the fact that the team came out of nowhere to win three Super Bowls in four years, remaining dominant and perpetually relevant for a decade, and then winning three more Super Bowls in another five-year span.
Yet through six episodes, the "dynasty" portion of "The Dynasty" has clearly taken a back seat. And it's fair to wonder whom exactly the show is being made for.
At this point, it doesn't feel like Patriots fans are the target market. After buzzing through two Super Bowl-winning seasons in just three minutes, the series made a sharp pivot. After briefly spotlighting the playoff losses in 2005 in Denver and in 2006 in Indianapolis, an entire episode was dedicated to Spygate and the loss of a perfect season in Super Bowl XLII.
The fifth episode focused entirely on Brady's season-ending injury in 2008, Matt Cassel's work in a playoff-less season, and the frustrations of the 2009 season.
The sixth episode was all about Aaron Hernandez.
Next week, it'll be a DeflateGate episode.
Included in that episode and beyond, the Patriots get back to winning Super Bowls, but not without a heavy series focus on the strain that the Jimmy Garoppolo selection put on Brady and Belichick's relationship. Even the 28-3 Super Bowl comeback against the Falcons -- arguably the greatest team and individual feat in NFL history -- is presented in a way that has a dark cloud hovering above it, portending the doom of an inevitable "collision" between Brady and Belichick. After that, there's one more Super Bowl to be won, but there will be a whole lot of focus on Malcolm Butler and the Super Bowl loss to the Eagles leading up to the dynasty train finally coming off the tracks.
On the one hand, Patriots fans who followed the early days of the dynasty don't need to rehash everything from, say, the 2003 and 2004 seasons. We know the Lawyer Milloy trade shocked the locker room, we know Rodney Harrison sparked the defense, we know the team went on a 21-game winning streak, we know Brady won the 2004 AFC championship with a 103-degree fever, etc., etc., etc. Sitting through all of that again after so many documentaries and NFL Films specials have covered it would feel like overkill.
Yet for any Patriots fans born after the early '90s who've never collected championship DVDs, plenty of the stories from those Super Bowl seasons certainly would have been new information. Those seasons definitely would have been more important to the story of "The Dynasty" than the 2008 season, which got its own episode.
And for as fun as it may be for "haters" of the Patriots to bask in the negative stories like Spygate/DeflateGate/Malcolm Butler/etc., are Colts fans or Jets fans going to sit around and watch a 10-part docuseries on the Patriots? That feels unlikely.
So if it's not really for Patriots fans but also not really for the average NFL fan ... who is it for?
Social media has largely criticized the series as a vanity project for Kraft.
It's been evident since the first trailer dropped that the series would be focusing heavily on the drama, the friction, and ultimately the divorce that ended the near-20-year run atop the NFL. Plenty of that makes perfect sense, as drama tends to drive viewership, no matter what the subject may be. It's just that the reason the end was so fascinating is because everything that transpired before it was so off the charts, so unprecedented, so phenomenal that it's simply wrong to gloss over so much of the glory days. It leaves viewers in the dark, forcing them to fill in a few too many blanks for "The Dynasty" to serve as anything close to a complete history of the actual dynasty.
