The Sports Shows That Changed How We Watch Sports: Drive to Survive, Ted Lasso, and Everything That Followed.
Drive to Survive premiered on Netflix in 2019. Before it, 14.6% of American sports fans followed Formula 1. After it, 53% of American F1 fans said the show was the reason they became fans. These are not shows about sports. They are shows about why sports matter. That is a different thing entirely. Ted Lasso returns August 5. This is the list of what to watch and why it works.
There is a category of sports content that does something no live game can do on its own: it turns strangers into fans. A person who has never watched Formula 1 sits down with Drive to Survive, meets the drivers, understands the stakes, feels something real, and then finds themselves watching a race in Bahrain at 6 AM on a Sunday morning because they need to know what happens to the people they met on the show. This did not happen at scale before 2019. It is now the central mechanism of sports fan acquisition. Every major league has a version of the formula. Most of them are good. A few of them changed things permanently.
——— THE ONE THAT STARTED IT ———
Drive to Survive: How a Netflix Documentary Turned 71 Million Americans Into Formula 1 Fans
Formula 1: Drive to Survive premiered on Netflix on March 8, 2019. The first season had been filmed during the 2018 F1 season, with access to most but not all teams — Mercedes and Ferrari initially declined to participate, a decision both would later reverse. The show followed the mid-field teams, the drivers no casual fan had ever heard of, and the political drama of a sport that had historically kept its internal conflicts well away from any camera. Box to Box Films produced it. Netflix bet on the format. Neither party anticipated what happened next.
By the numbers: 53% of American F1 fans said Drive to Survive was the reason they became fans, according to a 2022 Morning Consult poll. Nielsen tracked more than 360,000 viewers who watched no F1 content in the latter part of the 2021 season but started watching races in 2022 after seeing the show. The average age of the F1 viewer dropped from 44 to 32. The proportion of female F1 viewers rose from 32% in 2018 to 40% in 2022. ESPN F1 viewership was up 50% by 2021. The Miami Grand Prix was added to the calendar. The Las Vegas Grand Prix was added. New races, new markets, new faces in grandstands that had never seen a new demographic arrive in this volume.
The formula Drive to Survive invented was specific: it ignored the race results and covered the people. The driver who got dropped from his seat. The team principal who screamed at his engineers. The rivalry between teammates who could not stand each other. It treated F1 as a soap opera with cars, and the cars turned out to be the least interesting part. “Netflix has enabled us to showcase the sport in a whole different light, making the drivers and team principals overnight celebrities to a new audience,” Ian Holmes, then F1’s director of media rights, said at the time. By 2024, CNBC estimated that 71 million Americans were F1 fans who do not watch the races. Drive to Survive created an entirely new category of fan.
“Drive to Survive sparked this interest in F1 during lockdown, which people then took online, creating this community of content creators who were able to show people a totally new side of the sport. There isn’t just one way to be an F1 fan anymore.”
——— THE SHOWS ———
Best Sports TV Shows: The Complete List of What to Watch and Why Each One Works
The success of Drive to Survive triggered a wave of similar productions. Every major sport now has a version. The quality varies enormously. What follows is the definitive list of what is worth your time, organized by what each show actually does and why it works.
Formula 1: Drive to Survive
Netflix · Formula 1 · 2019-present
The original and still the best of the genre. Eight seasons in, it has not lost its ability to make a casual viewer care about a sport they previously knew nothing about. Start with Season 1 regardless of where the current F1 season stands. The drivers you meet in the first season are the reason you will stay. Season 5 alone drew over 90 million viewers.
Ted Lasso
Apple TV · Soccer / Premier League · 2020-present · Season 4 premieres August 5, 2026
Ted Lasso began as a joke. Jason Sudeikis played an American football coach hired to manage a fictional English Premier League club in a series of NBC Sports commercials in 2013. Seven years later, Apple TV turned the concept into a show. The show won 13 Emmy Awards. It introduced the Premier League to an audience that had no prior soccer interest and made them care, not about the tactics or the standings, but about the people. Season 4 returns August 5, 2026, with Ted coaching AFC Richmond’s women’s second-division team. New cast members include Tanya Reynolds, Jude Mack, and Grant Feely alongside returning favorites Jason Sudeikis, Hannah Waddingham, Brett Goldstein, and Roy Kent.
Hard Knocks
HBO / Max · NFL · 2001-present
The original access documentary in American sports. Hard Knocks has been following one NFL team through training camp every summer since 2001. It invented the template that Drive to Survive later applied to Formula 1: go behind the scenes, show the people, make the viewer care about the ones who don’t make the final roster. The best seasons are defined by the teams that had the most to lose — the 2010 New York Jets, the 2013 Cincinnati Bengals, the 2018 Cleveland Browns. Every Hard Knocks season is different. All of them are worth watching.
The Last Dance
ESPN / Netflix · Basketball / NBA · 2020
Ten episodes. Michael Jordan. The 1997-98 Chicago Bulls season, intercut with the full history of Jordan’s career. Produced with unprecedented access to footage that the NBA and Jordan had kept locked away for years. 5.6 million viewers per episode on ESPN, the largest documentary audience in the network’s history at the time. Required viewing for anyone who wants to understand what professional basketball looked like at its absolute peak, and why Jordan remains the reference point for every argument about greatness in American team sports.
Welcome to Wrexham
FX / Hulu · Soccer / Non-League Football · 2022-present
Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought Wrexham AFC, a Welsh soccer club competing in the fifth tier of English football, and gave a documentary crew full access. What followed was one of the most unexpectedly moving sports documentaries ever made: two celebrities who knew nothing about the sport, a town in North Wales whose identity was inseparable from a club that had been struggling for decades, and a story about what it means for a community to believe in something again. Three seasons in. The show has driven significant new interest in non-league soccer in both the UK and the United States.
Full Swing
Netflix · Golf / PGA Tour · 2023-present
Box to Box Films — the same production company behind Drive to Survive — applied the same formula to professional golf. The result is the first golf documentary that makes non-golf fans care about golf. The first season coincided with the LIV Golf controversy and the fracturing of the PGA Tour, which gave the show a genuine ongoing drama that golf had not had in years. If you have ever wondered why people watch golf, Full Swing is the most efficient explanation available.
Break Point
Netflix · Tennis · 2023-present
The tennis version of the Drive to Survive formula, covering a full ATP and WTA season with access to players across the tour. Less dramatically successful than its F1 counterpart — the show was paused and restructured after its first season — but still the best introduction to professional tennis available for a viewer who knows the Grand Slams by name but not the players who compete in them. The episode on Nick Kyrgios is worth watching regardless of your level of tennis knowledge.
Tour de France: Unchained
Netflix · Cycling · 2023-present
Three weeks. Twenty-one stages. The most physically demanding event in professional sport. Unchained is the cycling entry in the Box to Box catalogue and it is, episode for episode, the most viscerally intense of all the sports documentaries in this list. The climbs. The crashes. The individual suffering and collective organization of a sport that most Americans have never watched. If you watched the Tour de France coverage on Sideline and wanted to understand what the race actually is from the inside, start here.
——— WHY IT WORKS ———
Why Sports Documentaries Turn Casual Viewers Into Fans: The Formula Behind the Shows
The formula that Drive to Survive invented and every subsequent show has adopted is not complicated: show the people, not the sport. The sport is the container. The people are the content. A viewer who does not know what DRS is and does not care will stay with a show about a driver who has six weeks to prove he deserves a seat, or a team principal who screams at his engineers in a language that becomes suddenly comprehensible when you understand what is at stake. The sport teaches itself through the emotional stakes of the people competing in it.
Two thirds of participants in a 2025 academic study of Drive to Survive viewers credited the show for their newfound or deepened fandom of Formula 1. The mechanism is consistent across every show on this list: the documentary creates a parasocial relationship between the viewer and the athlete before the viewer has any knowledge of the sport. By the time they watch a live event, they already care about specific people. The result is not a casual viewer. It is a fan. This is the most efficient fan acquisition mechanism that professional sports has ever produced, and it arrived so recently that most leagues are still figuring out how to fully use it. The NFL’s version of this story — how a league becomes part of a city’s permanent infrastructure — is explored in this piece on the NFL’s expansion strategy.
“Drive to Survive has been credited with driving a surge in fans of F1, while also driving down the average age of viewers from 44 to 32 and increasing the female section of its audience from 32% in 2018 to 40% in 2022. Season 5 alone drew in over 90 million viewers.”
Drive to Survive. Ted Lasso. The Last Dance. Hard Knocks. Welcome to Wrexham. Full Swing. Break Point. Tour de France: Unchained. Eight shows. Eight sports. One formula: show the people, not the sport. The sport teaches itself.
Ted Lasso is back August 5. Drive to Survive Season 8 is already out. The rest of the list is waiting whenever you are.
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