There have been documentaries and several books about the New England Patriots' unprecedented NFL success from 2001 through 2019. Some of them have been really well done, others have been just OK.
The latest telling of the story has a lot of people excited, and for good reason.
A new documentary titled, The Dynasty, will be released Friday, Feb. 16 exclusively on Apple TV+. Two episodes will come out each Friday for five consecutive weeks until all 10 are available.
Stay in the game with the latest updates on your beloved Boston sports teams! Sign up here for our All Access Daily newsletter.
One of the great things about this documentary is that it's not told through one lens. It's not a puff piece for Robert Kraft, or Tom Brady or Bill Belichick. There were interviews with more than 70 people, including just about every major player/coach/exec you could imagine, who all candidly tell their side of the story.
🔊 Patriots Talk: 'The Dynasty' director goes deep on difficulty of Bill Belichick interviews | Listen & Subscribe | Watch on YouTube
Getting all of these perspectives was really important to the doc's director, Matt Hamachek, who recently joined NBC Sports Boston's Patriots Talk Podcast.
"There's been a million different tellings of this story. A lot of them were through a very specific lens," Hamachek said. "But if you've got 70 people and you've got Ernie Adams, the director of football research, you've got Scott Pioli and you've got Bill Belichick, and then you also have everybody from Ty Law to Rob Gronkowski, Tom Brady. From the players' perspective, it's a collection of voices telling the story. It's not one specific lens. And that was so important to us when we were starting out is that this is not any one person's story.
"And it goes back to that line at the end when (Scott) Pioli is talking about how it's almost insulting to even ask the question, is it Brady or is it Belichick? Because it is a collection of all these voices. When you have this opportunity to talk to all these folks, a lot of your job is sitting back asking decent questions, hopefully, and letting them talk and tell the story through their eyes."
More Patriots coverage
Getting all of these people to go on record in front of a camera is not easy. Some of them wonder how they're going to be portrayed. Others might wonder whether it's worth their time. They want to know who else is participating. This documentary did a great job convincing people that, yes, everyone is going to be heard from and it's going to tell a really comprehensive account of what transpired over two decades in Foxboro.
"That same discussion was had with pretty much everybody that was on this project, whether it was Bill, Ernie, Adam Vinatieri -- it took a year and a half to try to get (Vinatieri) to finally go on the record," Hamachek said. "And Adam's main concern, and you'll see this in the two episodes that are about to air on Friday (Feb. 16), because the second episode is the snow game and arguably the greatest kick in NFL history. In my mind, at least.
"Adam's concern was, look, I get asked to do these things all the time. Is this actually going to be close? Is this actually going to be close to the definitive telling of the story? Are you actually going to get Tom and Bill and Robert, are you going to be able to get Rob and Danny, who obviously he didn't play with, but he understood what it meant to have these people on the record.
"And so that was something that really mattered to a lot of these people. Is this going to be the one? And I hope when they watch this, all those conversations that we had about being fair and seeing it from everybody's perspective is there."
Beginning this Friday (Feb. 16) and continuing every Friday for the next five weeks, NBC Sports Boston will do a half-hour show at 6 p.m. featuring our main takeaways from each documentary episode.
Also in this episode:
- How Super Bowl LI changed everything
- How difficult was it to interview Bill Belichick?