‘We Are: The Brooklyn Saints’ on Netflix

Coach Gawuala (9U Coach) with the 9U team in Netflix's 'We Are: The Brooklyn Saints'.
Coach Gawuala (9U Coach) with the 9U team in Netflix's 'We Are: The Brooklyn Saints'. (Image credit: Netflix)

Docuseries We Are: The Brooklyn Saints premieres Jan. 29 on Netflix. Directed by Rudy Valdez, the series has four parts. It looks at youth football in the inner-city East New York section of Brooklyn. 

“They say it takes a village to raise a child,” said one coach. “The Brooklyn Saints are that village.”

Imagine Documentaries and Disarming Films produced the series. 

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“Through intimate verité footage, the series immerses us in the world of Brooklyn Saints football and their community, chronicling the personal stories of the driven young athletes, as well as the support system of coaches and parents rallying behind them,” said Netflix. “Over the course of a season, we witness the Saints’ power on and off the field, as they celebrate victories and overcome losses, both personal and athletic. Raw and authentic, the pressures of adolescence unfolds in real time as the boys work to propel themselves to a brighter future.”

Other Valdez projects include documentaries The Sentence and The Last Patrol on HBO. He executive produces alongside Brian Grazer, Ron Howard, Amy Berg, Sara Bernstein and Justin Wilkes. 

“Like Friday Night Lights, Last Chance U and Cheer, Saints is less a story about competition than about community,” said the NY Times. “Here, the community is an inner-Brooklyn neighborhood whose adults banded together to restore a football program after a police-athletics league fell to budget cuts.”

Michael Malone

Michael Malone, senior content producer at B+C/Multichannel News, covers network programming, including entertainment, news and sports on broadcast, cable and streaming; and local broadcast television. He hosts the podcasts Busted Pilot, about what’s new in television, and Series Business, a chat with the creator of a new program, and writes the column “The Watchman.” He joined B+C in 2005. His journalism has also appeared in The New York Times, The Philadelphia Inquirer, Playboy and New York magazine.