Paramount
Here are some familiar sports stories: A scrappy crew of underdogs comes together to win the trophy, proving everyone wrong about them. The hotshot loses their cool as the new guy threatens to overtake them as star player. Internal and external pressure calls the team’s winning streak into question. The team’s biggest name refuses to retire, ends up embroiled in a murder trial that still ranks as one of the most shocking scandals of our time, or both.
Players is Paramount+’s fantastic mockumentary series, the latest project from the creators of American Vandal. That series, which ran for two seasons on Netflix, was a meticulous recreation of the booming true-crime drama. You’d be forgiven for believing it was an actual docuseries about a real incident at first—despite that (very fictional) incident being someone spray painting 27 penises on cars in a high school parking lot. (Season 2 revolved around the mystery of the “Turd Burglar.”) Players replicates that same, uncanny formula, applying it to an entirely different universe.
This mockumentary follows (almost) all those aforementioned sports tropes to the letter. (There’s thankfully no OJ Simpson analogue on this show.) But the athletes here aren’t basketball champs or soccer stars: Their sport of choice is the online multiplayer game League of Legends.