The biggest obstacle for Players may be whether it can meet the high expectations set by its predecessor. The series comes from the same team as Netflix’s prematurely canceled American Vandal, and it uses a similar mockumentary format to portray the last gasp of the fictional eSports team Fugitive Gaming and its star player (Misha Brooks), who goes by “Creamcheese.” At 27, Creamcheese has yet to win a championship and is fast approaching his sell-by date in the pro leagues. In need of new blood, Fugitive enlists a popular streamer, 17-year-old Organizm (Da’Jour Jones), and allows him to skip the lower “Academy” leagues, to the point of displacing Creamcheese’s most trusted teammate.
Players has the visual gloss and majestic soundtrack of your average sports documentary, and it gets amusing mileage out of the juxtaposition between a Reddit post titled “This Team Sucks Butt” and a dramatic music cue in the opening credits. But the series simply isn’t as innately funny as American Vandal, which dialed the absurdity of presenting the mystery surrounding juvenile high school pranks as a true-crime documentary to ridiculous extremes.
Organizm’s parents are incredulous at the prospect of people being paid to play video games, as well as people wanting to watch other people play video games. While this is meant to communicate a generational gap, it speaks to Players’s overarching problem: that what might seem preposterous to an outside observer has long been normalized by the show’s intended audience. Such viewers are so accustomed to terrible usernames, arcane terminology, and intrusive tie-ins that the presence of such details won’t be much of a joke.
Players often feels as if its farcicality has been reined in, which may or not have something to do with the series revolving around a real game. While a few silly lines play on the impenetrable jargon of team-based games like League of Legends, they fall short next to something like the overt absurdity of Mythic Quest, which centers a fictional MMORPG and more reliably and virtuostically spins off into the absurd.
The burden of humor in Players thus rests on characters like Creamcheese, whose egotism and obliviousness is played for laughs and whose name is admittedly hilarious to hear in serious contexts. But even here, the series doesn’t quite go far enough: If truth is often stranger than fiction, Creamcheese’s irritating qualities hardly compare to the embarrassments of the real-life video game community, such as the bizarre gaffes that executives and streamers alike make on the regular. Worse, Creamcheese and Organizm’s rivalry never takes off in earnest, since the latter is written as so reserved and enigmatic that he leaves almost no impression.
With that said, the story of Fugitive Gaming is still engrossing, despite depicting a rather familiar clash between old and new. By interweaving the team’s present-day struggles with interviews and historical footage of its founding, its rise, and its subsequent plateau, Players maintains a surprising momentum. In this regard, the show’s most resonant role comes not from any especially weird comic relief, but in the devoted Kyle Dixon (Ely Henry), a founding Fugitive player turned long-suffering coach who must endure Creamcheese’s antics and a meddling owner (Stephen Schneider) who’s more into basketball. Players may not reach the comedic heights of American Vandal, but it most visibly follows in that show’s footsteps by taking its characters seriously, no matter how ridiculous their situation may be.
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