‘The Dynasty: New England Patriots’ Director Matthew Hamachek on Why He Describes His Docuseries is ‘Shakespeare but with Footballs’

Awards Daily talks to director Matthew Hamachek of The Dynasty: New England Patriots about why they’ll never be another pairing like Belichick and Brady.

Whether or not you’re a Pats fan, after you watch 10 episodes of director Matthew Hamachek’s docuseries The Dynasty: New England Patriots, you’ll feel like an expert on the topic. In fact, Hamachek didn’t even know a lot about the team until he started working on the Apple TV+ series.

“Not that I disliked them, it just wasn’t a subject matter that interested me because I didn’t grow up in New England,” said Hamachek. “All I knew was that they won a lot of football games, and as a casual observer, that they always kept everybody on the outside. You didn’t really know a lot about them, whether it’s their stars, coach, or owner even. First, with my documentary Tiger (on Tiger Woods) and now with Dynasty, we set out to make these stories very human and not about the sport itself. The sport of it all is really something that just helps the plot.”

So how do you make a docuseries for a team that has an obsessed fan base while also appealing to people who are not fans? That’s a pretty lofty endeavor.

“It took a lot of work. We needed to present football in a way where if you don’t know what a first down is, you can still watch these games and appreciate the drama that’s unfolding. Also, it’s setting up the stakes so that going into each game, you understand the interpersonal dynamics and how they affect what happens in each game. I’ve called it ‘Shakespeare but with Footballs.'”

And when it comes to a docuseries like Dynasty, the toughest critics are always going to be the die-hard fans, something Hamachek was very aware of.

“I knew not only as a non-fan of the Patriots but also as a filmmaker and my team of filmmakers that I collaborated with, we all understood that there didn’t need to be another puff piece about the Patriots. There are a lot of docs out now that feel like commercials for the people who are being focused on. I don’t think any of us wanted to do that. We wanted to make the unvarnished telling of the story. We wanted to celebrate them and all of their accomplishments, but also get into all the things that led to the end of this.”

In Hamachek’s first interview with football researcher Ernie Adams who appears in the film, Adams says every team wants to get to the Super Bowl each year, but not every team is willing to do what it takes to get there.

“That was a light bulb moment for me. This was a team that always did whatever it took to get there. So I thought, let’s examine that and why these personalities were right for each other and led to this incredible success. But also—what over the course of 20 years ultimately led to the unwinding of this perfect machine?”

In order to condense 20 years of football into 10 episodes, Hamacheck interviewed 75 people and had 30,000 hours of footage to go through (“It would take two Mack trucks to store all these tapes”). While some of the documentary team members were Pats fans, it really turned into a passion project for everyone involved.

“As we got further and further into this story that went beyond sports, we fell in love with telling it.”

Drew Bledsoe, Spygate, Aaron Hernandez, Deflategate, Trump and the issue of kneeling during the National Anthem. The docuseries hits on all of these topics.

“Each time we go to another chapter in the story, we wanted to always be saying, how is this the next version of the what does it take to get there? Then ultimately how it comes to an end and really diving into that and what it meant for different people on the team. In Episode 9, Trump, kneeling, and the relationship between Belichick and Brady had been simmering for a little bit, but they kept winning. Now, all this tension is there, but what happens when they finally lose? And that begins the unraveling of this.”

There are so many plot developments and twists within the Patriots’ narrative, but the throughline is the “love story” between two geniuses: Coach Bill Belichick and QB Tom Brady. Of course, they frequently butt heads, but in the same way Lennon and McCartney produced beautiful music together, so did Belichick and Brady.

“They were the perfect match for each other. They were both wildly driven people and they fed off of that in each other. You look at Tom, and he’s a guy who probably self-motivates in a way nobody else does. But he found the one coach who, as he became a superstar, never took his foot off the gas and let Tom feel like he could relax. I’m sure that was frustrating for Tom, but I wonder if that was the perfect coach for someone like him. He had this coach that never let him take a break. And then for Bill, he had this idea of the perfect team and that was this top-down [hierarchy]. What you need in that scenario is for the biggest star on the team to buy into that and be the punching bag. I think they were perfect for each other in that way. I don’t think that version of team-building can be replicated again.”

The Dynasty: New England Patriots is streaming on Apple TV+.