After two long seasons of eighteen and fifteen episodes each (and after an excruciating playoff loss in the climax of season one), season two concludes with Wrexham finally winning the National League Championship, granting them automatic promotion to next highest league, English Football League Two. This climax is extremely cathartic. For one, it’s well-shot, with slow motion cinematography lending epic grandeur to the players’ athleticism. It’s also well-edited: Wrexham is ahead 3-1 near the end of the game, so the outcome is more or less a foregone conclusion, but the episode is still climactic since it frequently cuts from the slow motion footage of the game to Reynolds, McElhenny, and various crowd members and long-suffering fans squirming in their seats, waiting with bated breath for the final whistle to sound. Perhaps most importantly, the climax is also scored to the triumphant grandeur of Bill Conti’s “Going the Distance,” originally written for Rocky in 1976, but used here in equally stirring fashion. The orchestral piece is essentially a minute-and-a-half crescendo toward an exhilarating, minute-long climax, one perfectly fitting for athletic victories, regardless of sport.
However, what makes this ending so enthralling, beyond its formal and stylistic features, is that it’s built on the back of two seasons’ worth of television, the length of which Wrexham uses to its advantage. Thirty-three episodes is a lot of television real estate, and Wrexham fills this landscape by approaching the team from a wide variety of angles. Like most sports documentaries, there is an obvious focus on the drama inherent to athletic contests in general, with many significant matches taking center stage (such drama is known as a “crisis structure” in documentary, where the interest hinges on the outcome or climax of a pressure situation). And like any other sports documentary, there’s a focus on the lives of the athletes and coaches as well: many individual episodes spotlight particular players and their families, often paired with the player’s heroics in a particular match. And of course, Wrexham also focuses on Reynolds and McElhenney’s ownership of the team, often leaning heavily on their charisma as they learn the ins and outs of overseeing a football club: assembling the talent and resources necessary for running the team successfully; learning about the sport (early on they struggle with offsides rules); learning about Wales in general and Wrexham in particular (McElhenny even learns some Welsh); and falling in love with the team and the sport.
More importantly, the series also spends significant time with the residents of Wrexham and the fans of the team (or “supporters” as they term themselves). Over and over again, we learn what the football club means to the residents of this town, how much they love their team, and how central it is to their feelings of community and to their sense of identity and self-worth. We meet single parents, bar owners, autistic teens, team volunteers, elderly residents who have had their hearts broken by the team’s fall from grace, little kids who have a lifetime of fandom ahead of them, and on and on. These characters are often highlighted in particular episodes, but they aren’t consigned entirely to these spotlights. Instead, they recur again and again over the course of the first two seasons, so much so that our experience of the team is mediated almost as much through their reactions to its ups and downs as it is through the formal choices of the documentary itself. They provide the series with a breadth and scope beyond just the stardom of the owners and the other key figures within the team.
It’s this focus on the residents of Wrexham that gives the climax of season two its power. Notably, the music, which is so crucial to this scene’s emotion, reaches its minute-and-a-half climax not when the final whistle blows, nor when the team’s players and coaches pile into a group hug, but at the exact moment when the fans rush the field in celebration (depicted in a shaky wide shot where the crowd’s roar jostles the camera, granting the image even more immediacy). This victory isn’t just about the team’s players and coaches, nor Reynolds and McElhenny (although we certainly see shots of them celebrating too), but most of all it’s about the many Wrexham residents who have lived and died with this team for years. Here, in the immediate moment of victory, we’re invited to share in their overwhelming ebullience as they scream and hug and sob and laugh. Not only do we see this celebration through the footage shot by the documentary crew, but we also see it through shots taken by the fans (and players) themselves, which further emphasizes the fans’ centrality to the entire experience.
The documentary does away with interviews for the rest of the episode. They aren’t needed, since we know what the team’s victory means and how they and the fans feel, not only because can we see their elated celebration, but also because we’ve been following them for thirty-three episodes. The extensive time spent with these characters better allows us to share in their outpouring of joy, and lets us know that it’s the product of years of tension, the exorcism of many past demons, and the validation of this town’s love for its team and its hopes for the future. Reynolds and McElhenney’s star power might draw in viewers initially, but it’s our intimate knowledge of Wrexham’s love for its team that provides the series’ most powerful emotive punch. As my wife said to me after watching the climax, “That’s how fans are made.”
Other notes:
- As if to underscore the time the series spends focusing on the fans, in season two, many of the Wrexham residents featured in the first season comment on how astonished they are to be treated like minor celebrities themselves, describing how they've been asked for autographs and selfies by fans of the series.
- Aside from its innate qualities as a stirring piece of music, it’s also fitting that Wrexham’s producers used the music composed for Rocky in the climax of season two, given that the first two seasons of the series actually resemble the structure of Rocky and Rocky II (spoilers for a pair of films from over forty years ago): much like Rocky, who loses the title bout with Apollo Creed in the original Rocky, Wrexham also loses in the playoffs at the end of season one, and of course, both Rocky and Wrexham win in the sequel.
- Despite Wrexham’s climax drawing so much of its strength from the time it spends with the team’s fans and the residents of Wrexham, sometimes season two struggled to fill its fifteen episodes, with some episodes diverging into distinctively tangential topics, like the episode entitled “Gresford,” which is about a 1934 coal mining disaster that killed over 260 Wrexham coal miners. Perhaps this struggle is one of the reasons season three of Wrexham (which I have yet to watch) is only eight episodes long.
- In one very important respect, the Wrexham producers were lucky in season two, in that there were actual competitive stakes to the games the team played. McElhenny and Reynolds poured a lot of money into this team to better ensure that it was promoted out of the National League and into the English Football League, where lucrative business opportunities will be much easier to come by (as much as they seem to have grown to love the town, their purchase of the team is also a business venture for them, and they want the team to succeed to grow their business and its profit potential – thus their decision to make a television series about the venture). However, this also meant that Wrexham was a lot better than many of its competitors in the National League, which, of course, would make the actual sports part of this sports documentary somewhat unexciting (Wrexham never lost a home game in season two, for instance). However, while Wrexham was winning most of its games, another team in the National League, Nott’s County, was able to match them nearly win for win, so the entire season turned into a two-team competition for first place (and automatic promotion), lending each individual match against lesser teams much higher dramatic stakes.
- As if to give them their due, near the end of season two, one episode also includes interviews with some of the players and coaches for Nott’s County. I think I would have enjoyed a bit more time spent with this team, rather than focusing on something like the Gresford tragedy, because it would have given a sense of the stakes for the other main competitor this season as well.
- However, unlike the Gresford diversion, I greatly enjoyed the two episodes that focused entirely on the women’s Wrexham squad – more time spent with them also would have been nice.
- Reynolds and McElhenney seemed like they attended many more matches in season two than in season one. Perhaps this reflects their increasing emotional investment in the team, or perhaps it's simply a product of scheduling happenstance (or both), but it also made me wonder about how much time they were actually spending in Wrexham, and how they were dealing with the jetlag.
