Written by Jesse Singer
Do you like football? Great! Do you know a lot about football? Doesn’t matter! This Netflix sport series is both entertaining and easily digestible, making it suitable to watch for all levels of football fans. Heck, even your mother who knows nothing about football can enjoy watching this as it gives an entire insight on the careers, lifestyles and relationships of football players.
So seriously, even if you don’t know what a touchdown is, you will not feel lost while following the lives of receivers during the 2023 NFL season in this first of eight episode series of Receiver.
Receiver opens with NFL Hall of Famers Peyton Manning and Randy Moss establishing the significance of a receiver and their relationship to the quarterback and the rest of the team. As Moss says, “All they gotta do is catch the ball, right?” Well, that’s pretty much the idea. However, there is much more to it than just that. Receivers, while they may not receive (no pun intended) as much credit as quarterbacks do, they are vital to the game. Even if they catch the ball they still have to avoid being tackled by several huge men.
The first receiver the audience hears from on the show is actually not a receiver, funny enough. It’s the charismatic tight end of the San Francisco 49ers, George Kittle. While he’s not a receiver, necessarily, he does still catch passes and score touchdowns. He likes to live by his motto of having ‘fun’ while he’s on the field. Otherwise, the game gets too stressful. Kittle is arguably one of the most playful yet physical guys there is in football. He even claims to play the most fun position in football. Unless of course you’re talking about his teammate and the wide receiver of the 49ers, Deebo Samuel.
The show transitions to footage of Deebo boxing at his gym. It doesn’t get more physical than that. If you didn’t know already, “Deebo” is not actually his real name. It was a nickname given to him by his dad when he was about five or six years old. Deebo used to like fighting and taking things from other kids growing up. So, his dad related his fighting to the character “Deebo” in the 1995 movie Friday. Thus, he received (he is a receiver after all) the name “Deebo.”
Since Deebo was a kid, he dreamt of a Super Bowl Win. He now has his own kid but has yet to win a Super Bowl. You might think that once an athlete has children they may start playing worse, as they are looking to settle down and build their family. That is actually the complete opposite case with Deebo. He feels that playing football now that he’s a father gives him more meaning as to why he’s even playing. His teammates have also commented on him playing better since he had a son.
The next receiver we hear from is Amon-Ra St. Brown from the Detroit Lions. Growing up his dad was quite strict with him in regards to his football training. His dad, John Brown was a two-time Mr. Universe and a three-time Mr. World bodybuilder. The goal was always to get his son into the NFL. His father didn’t know everything there was to football so he gained some help from the other dads on his son’s childhood football team. He asked one of the dad’s what he does with his son to practice. He told him they have a JUGS Machine and catch 200 footballs a day. Brown Sr. bought the machine and said that if the other kid is catching 200 footballs, Brown Jr. would have to catch 202. Just doing anything to be better than everyone else. Today, he catches 202 balls after every practice.
Brown has some other regimens he does before every practice and game. He memorized the 16 guys who were drafted before him in the 2021 NFL Draft. He reads the 16 names he wrote down in his notebook before his games. He does this to remind himself that people doubted him.
Just like the other players mentioned, Brown is also a silly player. After getting the first touchdown against the Kansas City Chiefs coming off their 2023 Super Bowl Win, Brown hit a hip thrust dance directly at the camera. The head official looked at the coach and said had Brown done another thrust he was gonna throw the flag. Brown explained that it was just “life imitating art” in relation to the 2013 Key & Peele Skit. In the skit Keagan-Michael Key is “pumping” in the end zone. The commentators say if he does a third pump the referee will draw a flag. Brown says though that his dance had more hand movement than hip-thrusting, but the football fans can be the ones to decide.
The episode goes even further into the family life of the players. The audience gets to see how they rewind on their weekends. Kittle explains how Thursday Night Football leaves him with Friday, Saturday and Sunday to relax and spend time with his wife Claire and his dog. His wife is also an athlete as she played basketball for the University of Iowa.
Brown describes his relationship with his mother. She was born in Germany. His father competed in bodybuilding competitions in Germany where he met her. She would make him learn ten German vocabulary words every day before he went to school. Because of that he can now read and write in German. If he wanted to go out with his friends, whatever it was he had to learn before leaving his house. He’d read ten minutes of a German book on his way to school. At the time he hated it but looking back he is happy his mother made him do that. He has instilled this work ethic into his games. Brown’s goal is to get two touchdowns in every game.
Playing is not all fun and games though. With receiving comes being exposed to being hit and tackled. During a game against the Seahawks, Brown injured his toe badly to the point where he could barely walk. A game following that he had an oblique injury. His toe was still hurting at this point. After that he was in the Week 4 game against the Green Bay Packers. He had a steel plate in his cleat to prevent his toe from bending. His oblique was still hurting him after the game. He got an MRI scan and it revealed that he tore his oblique completely off the bone.
The episode ends on a high note celebrating Kittle’s 30th birthday after just scoring three touchdowns in a game against The Cowboys of the same day. He also got fined $15,000 for wearing a shirt underneath his jersey that said “Fuck The Cowboys.”
Overall, this was a very enjoyable first episode. There is not much I would change about it. However, at times I felt that there was a lot happening in each player’s life. The show could have possibly dedicated one whole episode to just one player. Then again, there are seven more episodes to watch, so there is still a lot more to unpack about the receivers of the 2023 NFL season.
