Chances are that you are either deeply familiar with the vast world of players and streamers, or you are completely unaware of how far the idea of “esports” itself can go to make your head spin. As part of the latter camp, but with a formerly well-established sister, I approached “The Players” — the new Paramount+ comedy about a professional game team battling for relevance — with equal trepidation and curiosity. Could this written presentation delving into what makes games so huge finally make me understand why? Or will it rely on enough jargon and humor that it just flies over my head?
After watching the better part of the 10-episode season, the answer is…well, a bit of both. But framing the series as a classic sports documentary series in the context of “The Last Dance,” co-creators Dan Perrault and Tony Yasinda (from the hit “American Vandal” on Netflix) make it easy to come to the show with little knowledge of even the arena in which their characters play. By making all of her team members recognizable archetypes (eg, conceited star, vague income, resilient coach, etc.), “players” don’t need to understand everything that’s going on in order to understand the stakes and what drives her characters. All you really need to know is that “Players” is a show about competitors who started playing a game they love, turned that passion into lucrative careers, and have wrestled with the consequences of that choice ever since.
Even when you’re pulling off the weeds, you don’t have to understand all the intricacies of Twitch to understand why these themes work at a basic story level (although as with anything, some basic knowledge certainly wouldn’t hurt). As with Apple TV+’s “Mystic Quest,” “Players” is about gaming, but also about what happens when friends become co-workers, and when you turn your favorite thing in the world into your job.
Episode one picks up with the dominant multiplayer group Fugitive trying to reclaim their glory days by winning the elusive League of Legends tournament. Ringleader “Creamcheese” (Misha Brooks) aka Trevor (but they all handle their gaming knobs), is nowhere near the behemoth it used to be, so I can’t help but feel threatened by the arrival of a 17-year-old phenomenon, Organizm (Da’Jour Jones). Consider the fact that his best friends Kyle (Elie Henry), April (Holly Cho) and Frogger (Matt Sheffley) became his coach, manager and weakest teammates, respectively, and it’s safe to say that the Fugitive’s runaway success was a huge hit. Totally shook the wonderful, unwavering world of Creamcheese.
Although Creamcheese and Brooks’ performances gain more depth as the season goes on, focusing on his story above all others is the players’ weakest choice. Despite Organizm’s importance as a gamer and fugitive alike, his relative introversion makes him such a difficult character to hack, and the show takes a long time to do so. Players like Nightfall (Youngbin Chung), or teammate-turned-shock jock (Moses Storm), make enough side quests, but they’re still worth more than they get in the virtual spotlight episodes where the Creamcheese arc still takes center stage. . There is a version of “The Players” that might have worked as well, if it focused more on Kyle and April, who are a committed couple and the adults in the room even when they don’t want to.
Switching between the present and the timeline that led up to this point, the series unfolds into half-hour mock-style episodes that let everyone talk directly to the camera about how they see their parts in the ongoing Fugitive history. As with “American Vandal,” Perrault and Yacenda mimic the tone, look, and feel of their inspiration—in this case, documentaries like “The Last Dance” and “Formula 1: Drive to Survive”—so that it’s particularly easy to forget that the show Actually, it is my book. The players’ hit lines weren’t as public as those in “Vandal,” the show that followed two other ridiculous puzzles set in high school. In fact, calling “players” a “parody” might be technically accurate, but it feels spiritually wrong. That might make it less funny, but it also makes it more complicated. While many have approached the world of esports with an eye for hyperbolic matters, there is nothing to make fun of the way “players” explore it as a community, which is a better showcase for it.
The first three episodes of “Players” are now available to stream on Paramount+.
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