LOSERS.

• Author: Mangu-Ward, Katherine
• Position: DOCUMENTARY - Television program review - Brief article

In the eight episodes of the Netflix docu-series Losers, elite athletes get knocked out, trounced, screwed over, bitten, and booed. With different creative choices, the whole thing could have been a syrupy stew of inspirational insipidness, in which all of the losers turn out be winners after all.

Instead, there's not a lot of smiling--but there are also very few tears. The series is shot with a pleasingly uniform aesthetic and an eclectic mix of still-trim former athletes in nice sweaters reflecting on their losses. The mix of stories is varied and somewhat unexpected: I had clear memories of the near-misses of the backflipping French figure skater Surya Bonaly, for instance, but knew nothing about the cutthroat world of 1980s Canadian curling or desert...