‘The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins’ Review: Tracy Morgan and Daniel Radcliffe Make an Appealing Odd Couple in NBC’s Sports Mockumentary

I don’t mean to tell Hollywood’s creative forces what to do, but the pace of sports mockumentary production has fallen well behind the pace of sports documentary production. The latter is a genre that — as much as I watch it vociferously — is always in need of a little ego deflation.

There are great sports mockumentaries, like the HBO Sports tennis comedy 7 Days in Hell or the When We Were Kings-inspired “How They Threw Rocks” episode of Documentary Now!. It’s harder to do a sports mockumentary as an ongoing series, but the American Vandal guys tackled e-sports fairly well (at times) in Paramount+’s Players.

Premiering after the NFL playoff game on Sunday (January 18) on NBC a full month ahead of its February 23 launch, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins is still establishing its potential within the genre.

Like so many of Tina Fey and Robert Carlock‘s comedies, including 30 Rock, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins doesn’t start with full confidence in its overall voice or characters, settling to get most of its laughs from familiar cutaways and asides. As with shows including Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, Great News, Girls5eva and even the lesser Mr. Mayor, the improvement is swift and evident through the four episodes sent to critics

So watch the pilot for the unlikely comic pairing of Tracy Morgan and Daniel Radcliffe, but know that while I chuckled at the first couple of episodes, the third and fourth episodes were the ones that really made me eager to watch more.

Morgan plays Reggie Dinkins, a Brooklyn-born former top NFL draft pick and two-time MVP who signed with the Jets in 2005 ready to lead the team to the Super Bowl and become a legend. Instead, Reggie accidentally confessed to an extensive gambling problem and became a national disgrace.

Two decades later, Reggie is still doing surprisingly well, economically, thanks to the management of his ex-wife Monica (Erika Alexander). He has a nice house in New Jersey, a loving son (Jalyn Hall’s Carmelo), a best friend who lives in his basement (Bobby Moynihan’s Rusty) and an attractive young fiancée (Precious Way’s Brina). But what he really wants is to be universally loved again. And what he really, REALLY wants is to be reinstated into the NFL so that he can go into the Hall of Fame.

Reggie’s solution is to hire Arthur Tobin (Daniel Radcliffe), an Oscar-winning documentarian, to make an adulatory film about him, changing public perception and opening new doors.

But Arthur, covering up a disgrace, has his own ethics and his own ideas about what this documentary could be. He doesn’t seem to want it to be a hatchet job — the approach is vérité meets The Last Dance, give or take — but he wants to capture reality.

Monica doesn’t think either documentary is a good idea.

I understand completely that NBC will never have get a bigger lead-in audience than the one watching the Rams and Bears on Sunday night, but the pilot of The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins isn’t the best way to hook anybody.

Created by Carlock and frequent collaborator Sam Means, directed by Documentary Now! co-creator and “How They Threw Rocks” co-director Rhys Thomas, the opener is an only semi-necessary premise pilot, introducing Reggie and Arthur in some detail, Monica as a disapproving wet blanket, and both Carmelo and Brina as occasionally present appendages.

The conceit is probably most similar to Mark Monroe’s Charlie Hustle & The Matter of Pete Rose, a four-part HBO film that the baseball career hits leader and reluctantly admitted degenerate gambler hoped would reopen establishment doors and set him up for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Instead, Rose came across as unrepentant and wholly incapable of getting out of his own way.

Reggie Dinkins is not Pete Rose. He is, unsurprisingly, a Tracy Morgan archetype — a perpetual man-child prone to malapropisms, naïveté and unexpected bursts of wisdom, capable of misjudgments in the moment, but generally lovable. He attributes the ongoing opulence of his lifestyle to Monica’s business savvy, but this is the sort of thing you don’t want to think very hard about — either in terms of how few rough edges Reggie has for a degenerate gambler or any awareness Monica must have had about his proclivities.

I’m sure some of that will eventually be discussed — presumably that’s what led to the divorce — but through four episodes there’s no indication that Reggie ever hit rock bottom or even a minor level of discomfort.

Since we know the documentary is going to happen — because otherwise there’s no show — the first 22 minutes are mostly Monica shaking her head in disapproval, being the quintessential sitcom wife.

Morgan has always been a unique comic voice, and few people know how to channel that voice better than Carlock and Fey. But it takes three or four episodes before they also find a way to tap into the dramatic undercurrents that emerged in the better moments of his TBS comedy The Last O.G.

He’s got a good match in Radcliffe, who has spent the decade+ since that boy wizard franchise proving time and time again what an eager and generous comic foil he is. The pilot isn’t quite sure what makes Arthur funny, alternating between jokes about his artistic pretensions and his extreme whiteness. The former gets downplayed subsequently, and the latter gets dropped entirely.

Instead, in the third and fourth episodes, the series finds what’s sympathetic in Reggie and Arthur’s intersecting desperation, and benefits from it.

What the show really benefits from, starting with the second episode, is finding what’s funny and insecure about Monica. Once she isn’t a wet blanket she becomes a real character, and Alexander, who Hollywood has only periodically found ways to fully utilize since Living Single, is great. Moynihan gets better as the series finds a way to expose the loneliness behind his goofball exterior, just as Precious Way begins to pop when Brina isn’t just being put out there as a future trophy wife. So far, Carmelo has had the least chance to develop a real character, but the fourth episode, in which Monica considers dating an agent, gives hints of what Hall can do with stronger material.

(Why is the camera crew filming extended conversations about Monica’s dating life? Is the documentary aesthetic really being consistently applied at any point? These are questions you’ll have to assume will either be answered or smoothed over.)

The series hasn’t really built an ensemble yet. Arthur’s crew seems to be one cameraman, entirely off-camera. Monica has an inept assistant played by Unstable scene-stealer Rachel Marsh, who might be good for regular laughs but so far she’s only recurring.

But it feels like things are coming together.

In the short-term, though, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins is, like the lesser stages of Fey/Carlock shows, beholden to the hit-and-miss nature of its cutaways — including various products Reggie has endorsed, one odd commercial Arthur directed (unclear why a commercial shot by the director of the documentary is being included in the documentary), and several big laughs generated by outside projects Reggie made thanks to his fame.

I’d say the pilot is a little more miss than hit, but the ratio gets better with each episode I’ve seen.