Stream It Or Skip It: ‘UNTOLD: The Fall of Favre’ on Netflix, A Documentary Look At The Rise And Stunning Fall of The Gunslinging Quarterback

Brett Favre isn’t just a former football player–he’s a football legend. Over the course of twenty seasons in the NFL, he became a cult-like figure for his freewheeling, gunslinging style at quarterback. Not all that glitters is (green and) gold, though, and in UNTOLD: The Fall of Favre, a new hour-long documentary on Netflix, we see how a host of serious scandals have tarnished the image of this one-time hero.

UNTOLD: THE FALL OF FAVRE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: There’s one person who doesn’t show up here, and that’s Brett Favre himself. That’s okay–we don’t need him to tell this story. A broad collection of characters from Favre’s career orbit show up here, explaining both the side of the story he’d want you to hear–the on-field heroics, the small-town folk hero status–and the side he wouldn’t want.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The UNTOLD branding is becoming a familiar imprint for Netflix, focusing each installment on a single (often-sordid) sports subject. Looking outside that collection, though, a close parallel is HBO’s recent Charlie Hustle and the Matter of Pete Rose, which similarly focused on a brash, hard-driving athlete beloved in a city but reviled by many for his various misdeeds. Or Aaron Rodgers: Enigma, the story of the mercurial quarterback Aaron Rodgers, whose career trajectory mirrors Favre’s in many ways.

Photo: Bill Greenblatt/UPI/Shutterstock

Performance Worth Watching: A number of figures from around Favre’s career and the NFL at large show up to offer their commentary on both the highs and the extreme lows of his story. One of the brighter moments comes from former Packers general manager Ron Wolf, who recalls his excitement when he realized he could pry a bench-riding Favre away from the Atlanta Falcons. “He had everything you would want in a quarterback… the Falcons did not realize what they had with Brett. It’s one of those things… I was in it a long time, and you get a chance to get one right.”

Memorable Dialogue: “Some people might say he was the football God,” longtime NFL writer Peter King muses, “but, I mean, look–there are a lot of reasons why you might question Brett Favre’s inner goodness. People don’t want most of that stuff to come out. People want their heroes.”

Sex and Skin: Central to this story is the sexual harassment scandal that erupted around Favre in 2010, following his time with the New York Jets, and there’s frank discussion of that matter herein.

Photo: Stephanie Krell/UPI/Shutterstock

Our Take: UNTOLD: The Fall of Favre starts out like any story about a sports legend. We see highlights of a young Brett Favre in college at Southern Mississippi, where he quickly got attention for his freewheeling, gunslinging style of play. He’s drafted by the Atlanta Falcons, but unmotivated to learn the playbook and is dealt away to the bottom-dwelling Green Bay Packers. He steps into a game to replace the injured Don Majkowski and leads the Packers 92 yards to a game-winning touchdown. (This narrative elides the fact that he’d played poorly in a loss the previous week, but that’s well within artistic license for these sorts of stories). He turns the Packers from a thing of the past to the Team of the ‘90s, winning a Super Bowl and becoming the first player to win three straight NFL MVP awards.

Beyond the on-field successes, though, he displayed a magnetic style and a personality that fans and the media couldn’t get enough of. “He was easily the most charismatic player I’ve covered,” longtime NFL reporter Peter King notes. In a football-mad small town like Green Bay, Wisconsin, he was a genuine folk hero.

Of course, the story’s not all sunshine, roses and cheese-shaped hats.

“When you’re a superstar on the level that Brett was, there probably wasn’t a lot he couldn’t get away with when he was in Wisconsin,” Green Bay Press Gazette writer Dylan Tomlinson recalls. “There was a lot of womanizing going on early in his career here, and if you follow the team around for five years like I did, you see certain things. When his wife Deanna was going through chemotherapy for breast cancer, my editor pulled me aside and said ‘I want you to write a story about Brett Favre the family man’, and I was like… ‘yeah, I don’t write fiction’. People would do anything for 30 seconds of his time, and when that’s your life for fifteen years, you get a distorted view of what reality is.”

Here, we jump to Jenn Sterger. In a story familiar to anyone who spent time on the sports internet in the mid-aughts, we revisit how Sterger rocketed to viral fame while a student at Florida State University. During a nationally-televised game between FSU and Miami, ABC’s cameras honed in on a bikini-top-and-cowboy-hat clad Sterger on the sideline, drawing the leering praise of commentator Brent Musberger. Sports sites like Deadspin turned Sterger into an overnight celebrity, and appearances in Playboy and Maxim followed. “No shade–I played the game,” Sterger recalls. “It totally changed my life.“ She parlayed this fame into a web show with Sports Illustrated, and a nascent career in sports media. “I wanted to be Erin Andrews or Suzy Kolber.”

By 2008, Sterger had taken a job with the New York Jets as a gameday host, and that’s where her arc intersected that of Favre, who’d left Green Bay for the New Jersey Meadowlands. Favre took an immediate interest in Sterger, one that quickly turned to harassment, including sending the 25-year-old Sterger unsolicited nude photos. The story was later broken wide (against Sterger’s wishes) by Deadspin, leading to the first of multiple image-tarnishing scandals for Favre–and for a personal and career hell for Sterger.

“It’s ironic that the site that was so paramount in creating me would ultimately be the site that destroyed my life,” Sterger recalls with apparent (and justifiable) bitterness. “My life was ruined, and he went to the Hall of Fame.”

If you think that’s all the fall in The Fall of Favre, though, just wait: there’s more!

The back third of the documentary gets into Favre’s alleged embezzlement of Mississippi welfare funds. By that time, though, you should already have a pretty well-formed image of the guy that Brett Favre really is.

Our Call: STREAM IT. You might be aware of the broad strokes of Brett Favre’s fall from grace, but The Fall of Favre puts it in sharp detail.

Scott Hines, publisher of the widely-beloved Action Cookbook Newsletter, is an architect, blogger and proficient internet user based in Louisville, Kentucky.