phricai stairs caffer
Lorrine Hatala
Not only is the NFL playing on a Wednesday for only the third time since 1950, it brought on Netflix to carry the games. Netflix will stream two Christmas Day games globally as part of a three-year deal announced Wednesday as the league unveiled the regular-season schedule.
With the league continuing to make international inroads, including five games abroad this season, the prospect of partnering with Netflix was too good to pass up. Netflix has 270 million paid memberships in over 190 countries
Hans Schroeder, the executive vice president of NFL Media, said team owners meeting in March were presented with a plan where teams playing on Christmas Day would have their Week 16 games on Saturday, which would give them the same amount of prep time they normally have in a short week when playing on Sunday and Thursday.
The Jan. 13 AFC wild-card playoff game between the Miami Dolphins and Kansas City Chiefs on Peacock averaged 23 million, a record for the most-watched event on a streaming service. It also surpassed the audiences for the Saturday night wild-card playoff games that were shown on NBC in two of the past three years.
The NFL has not been shy in its pursuit of making its games as widely available as possible. On Wednesday, the league took another step toward its goal by striking a three-year deal with streaming giant Netflix.
The NFL's 2024 Christmas Day doubleheader will be available exclusively to Netflix subscribers at no extra cost. The Pittsburgh Steelers will host the reigning two-time Kansas City Chiefs in one of the two holiday games, according to Bleacher Report.
The NFL logo is seen on the field prior to the game between the Green Bay Packers and the Miami Dolphins at Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, Florida, on Dec. 25, 2022. (Megan Briggs/Getty Images / Getty Images)
"The NFL on Christmas has become a tradition and to partner with Netflix, a service whose biggest day of the year is typically this holiday, is the perfect combination to grow this event globally for NFL fans," Hans Schroeder, NFL executive vice president of media distribution, said in a statement.
Neflix and the NFL have had a relationship for the past couple of years. The docuseries "Quarterback" was released on Netflix in 2023 and this summer "Receiver" will premiere on the streaming platform. While "Quarterback" focused on three different signal callers who were at very different points of their respective careers, the pass-catching series will follow a total of four wideouts and one tight end.
When Arcane season 1 was released, it set a record as Netflix's then-highest-rated series within the first week of its premiere date. The praise and accolades only continued from there. Set in a steampunk-inspired world, Arcane chronicles the growing unrest that's brewing between the wealthy city of Piltover and its oppressed underbelly, Zaun. The series' protagonists, Vi (Hawkeye's Hailee Steinfeld), and her sister, Jinx (Fallout's Ella Purnell), find themselves at the center of the storm. In Arcane season 1's cliffhanger ending, a distraught Jinx finally accepts that she and Vi have diverged, despite their shared past.
The first outing ends as Jinx, now fully accepting of her identity and convictions, takes aim at the Piltover council. Needless to say, Arcane viewers like myself have been eagerly awaiting the fallout of the first season's climactic conclusion since the 9-episode show launched in 2021. Three years later, Arcane season 2 is finally hitting Netflix. However, the at-times excruciating wait makes the fact that the sophomore outing will be Arcane's last a bit of a letdown. Still, if the second season is as remarkable as Arcane's initial installment, it will be hard to feel disappointed at all.
Although the news of Arcane season 2 being the show's last outing is disappointing, I fully acknowledge that it's better to end Vi and Jinx's story on a high note. There's nothing worse than a series that overstays its welcome or drags a two-season arc into something much longer. Speaking to Variety, Arcane co-creator Christian Linke reiterated the Arcane team's commitment to the show's quality. "From the very beginning... we had a very specific ending in mind," Linke shared. So, if the show's carefully plotted story should end with the second season, Arcane must conclude with the sisters' heartbreaking war.
If there's one point brought home over the first episode of 'Sprint,' the new documentary by Netflix profiling the 100 meter Kings and Queens of track and field, it's that Noah Lyles is the main attraction.
The Virginia native comes locked and loaded with line after line in 'Heir To The Throne,' which is the first episode of six over the first season of the series, which follows professional 100 meter sprinters through the 2023 World Championships in Budapest, Hungary. Over six episodes we'll hear from Lyles, Sha'Carri Richardson, Zharnell Hughes, Marcell Jacobs, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, Shericka Jackson and Elaine Thompson-Herah, among others.
It's a special day for track and field, as we're fresh off the final days of the U.S. Olympic Track and Field Trials in Eugene and less than a month out from the Paris Olympics. So we're going to do what we do best and binge the entire season of Sprint, episode by episode.
Lyles proves to be a candid subject and a more-than-apt lead in the series, with his ability to rattle off stinging quotes, combined with his penchant for wearing big clothing and his overall main character attitude.
The first episode focuses on the pair in the lead-up to the Diamond League Paris meeting in 2023. We meet Lyles' mom, Keisha Caine Bishop, and his girlfiend, Junelle Bromfield, in Clermont, then later his coach, Lance Brauman, in Paris.
Fast forward to Rome. We're spending time with Jacobs and his wife, Nicole Daza, and his children. We're hearing about the injury that he's been managing, along with the criticism he's taken for skipping high-profile 100 meter events. Michael Johnson all but says his Olympic 100m title may have been a "fluke."
Multiple-time Olympian and track commentator Ato Boldon adds: "When he is healthy and is firing on all cylinders, he's the best in the world. That's why he's the Olympic champion. But he hasn't been close since."
Sprint's first episode is a quality introduction to the world of sprinting, into the minds and worlds of Lyles and Jacobs. Next up, Richardson, Shericka Jackson and the American vs. Jamaica subplots.
Like the series' first episode with Noah Lyles, we get an assortment of quotes to begin our introduction to Richardson, a Texas native, former LSU sprinter and graduate of Dallas Carter High School, and she does not disappoint.
Of course, while Richardson's 2023 season was nearly impeccable -- five wins in total across the 100 meter dash, including her World Championship win in Budapest -- her 2022 campaign was a bit of a mixed bag, as she bounced from the U.S. Championships.
We move back to Florida, and we meet Dennis Mitchell and the Star Athletics Club. We get into Mitchell's history with the U.S. team and his gold-medal in the 4x100 at the Olympic Games in Barcelona. We see him at home with his daughter and can understand the duality he plays, both as a coach and as a father wanting his daughter to succeed in this world.
Olympic gold medalists Usain Bolt and Allyson Felix chime in before we're in Kingston with Shericka Jackson, who we learn is the pride of Jamaican's track and field future. She does NOT want to answer questions about whether she's the future of the country's sprinting success.
Here, we probably get our most vulnerable moment of the episode as we touch back on the 2021 Olympics. Jackson ran her first round poorly, failing to advance through the 200m -- we see headlines criticizing Jackson's performance.
Jackson, 29, herself looks a bit nervous to be on camera -- maybe this just isn't her cup of tea. That dichotomy is all the more stark when you consider the first episode; the Americans thus far have been the driving forces of this documentary. They are brash and confident and offering the most pizazz.
The scene forwards a week later, and perhaps for the first time we see some sign of Lyles feeling discontent. Lyles tells us later in the episode that he can read his competition; it's all in the eyes. On the flip side, though, we can also see when there are cracks in Lyles' facade. Vulnerability is human, which is relatable. That's what's missing here, Lyles' processing what went wrong.
We finally meet Zharnel Hughes, a newly-crowned British record-holder who beat Linford Christie's 100m record of 9.87 in New York with a 9.83 clocking at the New York Grand Prix -- that time would stand tied for the fastest in the world over the 2023 season, along with Lyles and Christian Coleman.
Naturally, we now zoom in on a promotional shoot with Hughes and Christie, the 1992 Olympic champion, who comments that his competitors used to DO ANYTHING they could to set him off once he was down in the blocks. Flicking a small piece of rubbish into your lane. Who does that?
Not far away is Bishop, who's now at practice, and we begin to see the true connection Lyles has with his mother. She tells us that she once travelled all the way to Switzerland to see her son race for 19 seconds, only for a friend to tell her the real meaning of that trip: "Emotional support," she said.
We move to Hughes, who's playing a flight simulator game with his girlfriend, Shenel Francis. Boldon tells us Hughes is coached by Glenn Mills, who worked with the one and only Usain Bolt, and he adds that "their race models are very similar."
In an important moment of character-building, we learn that Hughes was forced to deal with hardships when the media in Great Britain challenged his allegiance, writing headlines which blasted that he was a "Fake Brit" because he was born in Anguilla, a British colony.
It didn't help that Hughes false-started out of the Olympic final in 2021, which only contributed to a domino effect, a series of false-starts at the British Athletic Champs, the Puerto Rico International Athletics Classic and the Birmingham Diamond League.
90f70e40cf