Stream It Or Skip It?

The Dallas Cowboys may not have won a championship in decades, but they’re no less present in the public’s imagination. The most valuable franchise in America’s favorite sport, the Cowboys are a cultural phenomenon–one inseparable from their swaggering, charismatic owner, Jerry Jones. In America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys, a new documentary series on Netflix, we relive the Cowboys’ dynastic days of the early 1990s, a time when they earned bragging rights to last for a generation.

Opening Shot: The now-familiar face of Jerry Jones looks out over a Texas oilfield from a helicopter, and then he begins telling us a story of one of his biggest gambles. Millions of dollars in debt and stretched so thin his wife was worried for his health, Jones spent the most money he’d ever spent on an oil well — one that turned out to be a tremendous gusher, turning his fortunes around. He smiles as he describes this moment as the realization of a long-held dream: “I remembered looking at that oil, and I said to myself, ‘Jerry, you just bought the Dallas Cowboys. Bam.”

The Gist: There’s a lot of familiar faces here–Jerry, Jimmy, Michael, Troy, and so on–but how well do you know the story of Jerry Jones’ takeover of the Cowboys, and the building of the dynasty that followed? The first episode of America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys is the superhero origin story, following Jones’s acquisition of the NFL’s marquee franchise and the beginning of his efforts to reshape it in his image. That story’s told by Jones himself, along with a host of players, coaches and media members involved in it, interspersed with headlines, news clips and highlights from the time.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? There’s some obvious overlap here, given the presence of former Hurricanes Jimmy Johnson and Michael Irvin, but I couldn’t help but recall one of the earliest (and best) installments of ESPN’s 30 For 30 series, The U. Just like the University of Miami football team in the 1980s, the Dallas Cowboys in the 1990s were all about personality, swagger, and kicking ass–and, like The U, The Gambler and His Cowboys embraces that attitude and culture.

And since we’re on the topic of the Dallas Cowboys, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention Netflix’s wildly popular series America’s Sweethearts: The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, which just got renewed for a third season. Yee-haw!

Our Take: The words “Jerry Jones” and “Dallas Cowboys” might be nigh-inseparable concepts these days, but it’s worth revisiting how much skepticism greeted the Arkansas oilman when he arrived in Dallas. “This has got disaster written all over it,” one anonymous radio caller notes, and they’re summing up the general mood among Cowboys fans, at least as this documentary remembers it. “This is all plotting by Jones to ruin the Cowboys so he can move ‘em to Arkansas,” another speculates.

The Cowboys were America’s Team, and head coach Tom Landry was as iconic a figure as the sport had ever seen, but the glory days of the 1970s were behind both team and coach. “1988 marked their third straight losing season,” recalls then-respectable Cowboys beat reporter Skip Bayless, not yet an ESPN morning-show heel. “The mystique had died.” Bayless recounts seeing Landry forget players’ names and forget plays he’d just called. Team owner Bum Bright’s banking fortune was in shambles, and the team needed a savior.

Practically no one expected Jerry Jones to be that savior–except, of course, for Jerry Jones.

“When I met with Mr. Bright,” Jones recalls, “I wrote down the figure–$150 million. That was the highest number in the history of sport! We got down to where we couldn’t agree on about $300,000, and Mr. Bright looked over at me, and he said, ‘I’ll flip you a coin for it. He flips the coin, I lose. I lost $300,000.” He chuckles, relishing the irony. “I really got fucked. I own the Dallas Cowboys.”

Jones’s first press conference as the Cowboys’ owner — one that would come to be known as the “Saturday Night Massacre” for his unceremonious firing of Landry, general manager Tex Schramm, and a number of other longtime fixtures of the franchise — is stunning to watch three and a half decades later, not for the audacity of the moves, but for the incomplete swagger of Jones. He’s got that same Arkansas drawl we all know, but there’s a tinge of hesitation, a handful of pauses and “ums” that don’t exist in his vocabulary today.

“I’m sitting there in the front row, and I’m dumbfounded,” Bayless recalls. “This hick from the Arkansas sticks, he was celebrating Christmas morning, while Cowboy Nation was mourning the football death of Coach Landry.” Jones might be the villain on Day 1, but it’s a gamble — a big bet that he knows could pay off massively, and one he notes with a prescient statement:

“I want to emphasize to you that one of the finest things–er, one of the greatest things that will have happened in Cowboy history is Mr. Jimmy Johnson joining the Dallas Cowboys.”

A generation later, it’s hard to argue with that, and America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys will easily suck you in for the rest of the story.

Sex and Skin: You’d think there’d be some in a show about the Dallas Cowboys, but surprisingly enough, there isn’t.

Parting Shot: Jerry’s taken over the Cowboys, fired Tom Landry, and made a lot of enemies. “They were America’s Team,” one fan laments in an interview. “Now they’re Jerry Jones’ team.” But there’s hope on the horizon. “The season before we got there, the Cowboys were the worst team in the league. The only positive thing about bein’ that bad, is we earned the first pick.” We then cut to highlights of UCLA’s Troy Aikman,

Sleeper Star: From the subject matter and the intro, you expect certain people to show up here — Jones himself, stars from those dynastic days, media members like Al Michaels — but you might not have counted on former President George W. Bush showing up to offer perspective on the Cowboys’ historical importance. He reflects on Dallas’s tarnished place in the American psyche after the JFK assassination, and the Cowboy’s role in rehabilitating that image.

Most Pilot-y Line: “I was born to play wide receiver,” Cowboys legend Michael Irvin recalls, with the lack of understatement you’d expect. “When I was born, the doctor tried to spank me, I caught his hands! Anything comin’ at me, I catch, you know?” Later, he continues, “in the ghetto of Fort Lauderdale, when you were as ‘po’ as we were, you can’t even afford that other ‘o’ and ‘r’, you just say ‘po’”. (As many an NFL reporter learned over the years, Michael Irvin gives great copy.)

Our Call: STREAM IT. Love ‘em or hate ‘em–if you’re a football fan, you’ve got strong opinions on the Dallas Cowboys, and America’s Team: The Gambler and His Cowboys is a sharp, swaggering story of their finest era.

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