This season’s Hard Knocks finale was like watching the end of NBC’s Friday Night Lights—but if Eric and Tami Taylor got a divorce instead of moving to Philadelphia together.
Consider this a complement to HBO. For the first few episodes, it managed to establish characters as quirky and lovable as the ones drafted by fiction writers nabbing ideas out of thin air. It was a renaissance season for the documentary program—a gem from both a storytelling perspective and public relations perspective in Cleveland. Let’s not forget how wide open their doors were, and how bare they laid themselves at a strange but exciting time in franchise history (a reminder: It’s not like this during most Hard Knocks seasons).