The most uttered phrase in the first season of The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins is three short words: “Don’t film this.” Reggie (Tracy Morgan), a pro football star whose career was ended by a gambling scandal, is planning a comeback 20 years later, and he’s decided that the best route to recapturing the public’s affection is to produce his own biographical documentary—a subgenre that’s become so ubiquitous that he’s able to pick and choose from a wide range of predecessors. (He wants his, he explains, to be more like Pharrell’s than J.Lo’s.) The problem is that the Oscar-winning documentary-maker he’s hired for the purpose keeps doing his job. It takes a minute to discover just why Arthur Tobin (Daniel Radcliffe) is willing to devote himself to such an uncooperative subject, one who shoos his cameras away the moment things start to get interesting. But you get the sense that success for a documentary filmmaker looks very different from the way it does for a former sports icon. Two decades after the scandal, Reggie is still living comfortably, if not extravagantly, off the proceeds from his brief career. The most Arthur’s Oscar has gotten him is a teaching gig at the University of Maryland Center for Documentary, Anime, and Pornography.
If you didn’t know that The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins was created by 30 Rock veterans Robert Carlock and Sam Means, you’d probably have guessed it from that last joke, or maybe the one a few minutes into the pilot when Reggie, trying to prove that he’s not just a dumb-as-rocks athlete, exclaims to the camera, “Books are brain movies!” (You’d be wrong, however, to assume any connection with the vintage British sitcom The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, about the daydreams of a repressed middle manager.) Without Tina Fey’s name as co-creator, the show is technically less of a direct descendant than Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt or Mr. Mayor. But of all the series released under the Carlock–Fey banner, this feels the most like a true heir to 30 Rock’s sensibility, which is to say it’s familiar in the best of ways.
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In practical terms, Reggie probably takes specific inspiration from the 30 Rock episode “Queen of Jordan,” a stand-alone reality-TV spoof that grew in part out of network pressure to cut costs. Reggie Dinkins doesn’t look as if it was made on the cheap, exactly, but Arthur’s assignment to capture the real Reginald Dinkins in his home environment leads to a lot of scenes set in a nondescript New Jersey house and its immediate environs. I don’t mean to suggest that NBC hasn’t put any resources behind the show, whose first episode debuted in a prime-time slot following an NFL playoff game. (The pilot will re-air tonight at 8 p.m. Eastern and will be immediately followed by the second episode in the show’s regular 8:30 p.m. Monday time slot.) But when Arthur gets the news that the league won’t allow them to use any footage of Reggie’s professional career, you’re meant to be in on the joke that the show is solving a financial problem as well as a narrative one.
Reggie isn’t as much of an unhinged loon as Morgan’s Tracy Jordan; his fame lasted long enough to make him rich, though not so long that the constant coddling of fans and hangers-on cooked his brain for good. But Morgan doesn’t seem particularly concerned with differentiating the two, nor are the show’s writers. And you know what? That’s fine. The relatively subdued style of a mock documentary keeps Morgan at a relatively subdued level—think a 6 rather than a 9—but allows him enough loopy eccentricity to fully drive his documentarian up the wall. Arthur is desperate to find an unseen side to this once famous figure, but Reggie’s version of acting like a regular person is putting on a tuxedo to cook breakfast—a breakfast that turns out to be a badly charred roast turkey.
Tracy Morgan and Daniel Radcliffe make a delightful comic duo, their shared anxieties vibrating on wavelengths that amplify one another.
It doesn’t take long to understand that Reggie isn’t unable to reveal his true self to the camera so much as terrified to. He still can’t show his face in public without getting booed by his former supporters—Jets fans are not ones to let a grudge go easily—and even his former coach (Corbin Bernsen) still has an axe to grind 20 years later. But he’s surrounded by people who know his better side: his ex-wife and current manager Monica (Erika Alexander), who bears no ill will toward Reggie or his fiancée, Brina (Precious Way), an influencer half his age; his teenage son Carmelo (Jalyn Hall), who seems to like being a child of divorce because it means his dad’s always buying him expensive apology gifts; his former teammate Rusty (Bobby Moynihan), who now lives in his basement and functions as a one-man entourage.
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The heart of the show, though, is the relationship between Reggie and Arthur, an odd couple united in their quest to show the world they’re not as much of an embarrassment as people think they are. Arthur’s professional humiliation, which involves a tennis-ball-related tantrum on the set of a Marvel movie, is private at first. (The show is no more preoccupied with explaining how the implosion of a major Hollywood blockbuster could go unnoticed than with justifying the continued presence of a camera crew after Reggie temporarily kicks Arthur and Co. out of his house.) But eventually, the on-set footage leaks and goes viral, and it becomes clear their only path to redemption is each other. Arthur isn’t a constant presence, and sometimes the show just lets us sink into watching his footage without thinking about who might be shooting it. But Morgan and Radcliffe make a delightful comic duo, their shared anxieties vibrating on wavelengths that amplify one another rather than cancel each other out.
While it never pushes into Documentary Now! territory, The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins does get off a few well-placed jabs at nonfiction’s expense: Monica busts Arthur on his attempt to get her to elaborate on an uncomfortable subject by simply staying quiet, and Reggie tries to force Arthur to shut off his cameras by breaking into a Beatles song that would be too expensive to license. (In a budget-conscious twist, he’s actually singing a cheap knockoff.) But sending up the medium is just a bonus. The real prize is getting to watch Morgan and the rest of the cast find their groove and work their way toward creating a show that, if it doesn’t quite fill 30 Rock’s shoes, at least seems capable of following in its footsteps.
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