Cards on the table, I don't dislike Tom Brady, despite what my mother-in-law may think. I think he's truly one of the hardest-working and most dedicated people on the planet, and that he's earned every dollar and accolade and Super Bowl ring he has, and I can check my hometown bias here but I really do think he's the greatest quarterback of all time.
But that doesn't mean it's particularly interesting to see him selling his brand, so to speak. The lifestyle and real estate porn bits were fine, as far as docu-reality TV goes, but at the end of the day this was just "Keeping up with Tom Brady," I guess - a documentary that amounted to eighty or ninety minutes of... nothing substantial, nothing eye-opening. Here he is, in a cabana with his supermodel wife. Here he is, on a bros weekend to Montana with some teammates in the offseason. Here's his daughter, there's his son. Watching the Olympics last month, I quickly got tired of half of the puff pieces - and those lasted, like, five minutes, and often had far more interesting shit to say than "I knew this team was coming together after the Jets game."
Brady has said, of the series, that it's just nice to get "his story" out there. And that's fine and commendable, and presumably at forty he's allowed to be sick of taking flak and criticism from coaches and radio doofuses alike. But I can't help but shake the notion that, this close to the end of it all, he was better off waiting until retirement to make something like this - or at least until the offseason!
I don't regret watching this any more than I regret watching, oh, fifty to a hundred hours of NFL football last season. I'm still a Patriots fan, after all! But this is an early frontrunner for "least essential 'TV show' of 2018."
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