Level Playing Field is a four-episode docuseries, crated by HBO Sports and Vox Media, that takes a look at how the wrangling over policy on a federal level has hurt programs involving Black and other minority athletes. These stories are connected to larger societal issues, supported heavily by Vox’s signature style of animated statistical graphs.
Opening Shot: A shot of Baltimore’s residential areas. The voice of Baltimore mayor Brandon Scott can be heard talking about growing up in Baltimore City and how being around drugs and violence “changes you.”
The Gist: The first episode is about how Midnight Basketball, which started in Baltimore in the late 1980s and spread nationwide by the mid 1990s, really helped its participants — mostly Black male teens — stay off the streets and get training that will help them get jobs after high school. It was such a successful program, especially after the Chicago Housing Authority adopted it, that it attracted the attention of both presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
As participants in the programs, as well as those who ran them, explain in interviews, it was a program that appealed to law-and-order conservatives, because many of the coaches and other administrators came from the ranks of the police, as well as socially-minded liberals, because of the training that the players went through. It was also cost efficient.
But when Clinton introduced funding for this and other social programs in the 1994 Crime Bill, the term “midnight basketball” became code, for both Republicans and Democrats. Republicans in Congress felt that programs such as this were “pork-barrel” spending that didn’t do as much to stem crime as more cops and more prisons would — despite the fact that midnight basketball itself would only be using a tiny portion of funds from the bill. But even Democrats unwittingly used the term as code, as members of both parties used it to talk about who the majority of people in the program were, which were Black males.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Level Playing Field is a bit of a more humanistic version of Explained, Vox’s Netflix docuseries. It uses the same graphics and leans heavily on animated statistical charts, but there’s definitely more in the way of human stories interspersed in the footage.
Our Take: What we appreciated about Level Playing Field is that it was able to encapsulate the history of the issue being explored, the problems it incurred, and how it relates to the culture at large, all in thirty minutes. It’s not trying to go off in different directions on a topic. It lays out the basics: The timeline, the main players, how policy wrangling brought the system down, and how it connects to the bigger picture.
The episode on Midnight Basketball gave us some information about the various programs that we didn’t already know. It also tried to paint the Republican objection to federally funding the programs in a light that just spoke to what the GOP point of view on the programs were, but those notions quickly gave way to one scene after another of a white legislator saying the words “midnight basketball” as a dog whistle. Not that we minded that point of view, but considering the weak attempts at playing the story down the middle, its hard left turn was curious.
But it was also an interesting look at how, even though the Crime Bill seemed like landmark legislation 27 years ago, it actually caused more problems than it solved, with incarceration skyrocketing and tensions between police and people of color coming to a head with last year’s killing of George Floyd. And even though funding for Midnight Basketball was just a tiny part of that bill, it was put out as the strawman for both parties, signaling that the bill became more about race than about reducing crime.
Other episodes in the series sound equally intriguing: How the NCAA “student-athlete” moniker ties into the misclassification of contract workers that is a hot-button issue in 2021; how Trump’s immigration policies led to a shortage of workers at racetracks and horse farms, which depend on workers from Central America; and how the players on the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream supported Raphael Warnock in his 2020 Senate campaign against Kelly Loeffler, who happened to be the team’s owner at the time.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Current-day shots of the Westside basketball league in Chicago, with one of the coaches saying, “I think that was one of the dark spots in our country. We’re going to have to atone for it. We’re going to have to do a lot to fix the damage caused by it.”
Sleeper Star: Mayor Scott was very forthright in his interview; he said that he didn’t see a rec center open in Baltimore until he was 35 years old. Folks, that was only 2 years ago.
Most Pilot-y Line: None we could find.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Level Playing Field packs a lot of good information into its half-hour episodes. But the episodes leave a lot of room to talk about the human sides of these stories.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
Stream Level Playing Field On HBO Max