More Than Just Games, Sports TV Shows — Fiction and Documentaries — Rely on Authentic Audio

From Welcome to Wrexham to Winning Time, sound teams balance authenticity and cinematic

A look at channel listings these days suggests that there are almost as many fictional and documentary sports productions as actual broadcast and streamed games and events. Examples range from comedies like the occasionally harsh IRL of Welcome to Wrexham and the optimistic comedy of Ted Lasso to Netflix’s Formula 1 opus Drive To Survive and HBO’s Succession-like Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty.

Sports have long been a fascination for Hollywood, from 1942’s melodramatic Pride of the Yankees to the grandaddy of primetime network sports series, Friday Night Lights. And both fiction and non-fiction productions have seen increases lately: Full Swing, which debuted this year and tracks top golfers through a season, was followed by a behind-the-scenes TV series on the 2022 FIFA World Cup, the Tour de France, and the Invictus Games. Sitcoms and dramas are also well-represented, with such titles as Glow, Necessary Roughness, The League, The White Shadow, and Ballers.

And all this content is increasingly marked by the same thing: both fictional and real-life portrayals of sports share broadcast’s emphasis on the audio.

“We might be able to enhance some of the sounds of a game on the show, such as the impact of a kick of a ball sounding like a cannon shot in a slo-mo scene,” says Jon Schell, sound effects editor on Welcome to Wrexham and three-time Prime-Time and Sports Emmy Award nominee for shows including The Playbook and Wrexham. “The sound of sports on television is already pretty cinematic, with microphones on the athletes and on places like the rim of the [NBA] basket. They do seem to be working off each other. We can play with [processing] like reverbs, but, like the people who mix the actual games, we do everything with the intent of telling the story.”

Welcome to Wrexham audio mixer Mark Jensen: “If you heard every ball catch, if you heard every tackle, if you heard every footstep, [it would be] bizarre. It just sounds fake.”

(Hulu automatically streams in 2.0 stereo; however, some devices can also play certain live content and on-demand titles in HD 5.1 surround. Badges during live playback or on the title’s Details page identify when 5.1 is available.)

The Crowd Is an Essential Element

Crowd sounds, recorded in discrete four-channel audio — two mics pointing left and right forward-facing, two pointing left and right but rear-facing synced on four discrete audio tracks, assigned LF-RF/LS-RS in the final mix — have given mixer Jensen a lot to work with. It was an audio element that was lacking in Wrexham’s first season, he says, but has been a star of the show’s second.

“The crowd and all the songs they sing and the energy they bring is an aspect that no other show has,” he explains. “The songs that they sing are very specific, and there are songs for every player, and when [a particular] player scores a goal, they sing a specific song. It’s amazing, and I was, like, we have to get this! So they recorded eight hours’ worth of crowd audio for us. If you watch Season 2, keep your ears peeled because there’s going to be moments when you’re, like, Wow, I feel like I am in this stadium. Audio-wise, it’s mind-blowing.”

What You’re Not Hearing

Although fictional and documentarian representations of sports might accentuate certain sounds of games, Jensen, an Emmy Award nominee who mixed audio for football-coach documentary The Playbook, says it’s also important to recognize what viewers don’t hear.

“If you heard every ball catch, if you heard every tackle, if you heard every footstep,” he says, “you’d be, like, this is bizarre. It just sounds fake, and, for me and, I think, for a lot of viewers, it would be a big turnoff.”

In fact, he adds, he has heard sports productions resort to sonic clichés, such as using the same impact sounds on every tackle, not unlike a sports version of the famous Wilhelm Scream, heard in thousands of movies since it was first recorded in 1951.

“At times,” he says, “I have to push back and say, Guys, look, this shot of this tackle is taken from the camera that was up in the stands, like 200 yards from that tackle; you’re just not going to hear anything from that. Perspective has to inform how I mix and what you’re going to hear. So I have to pull all that back and replace all the [cliché] tackles with my own tackles, which we now have lots of that we can throw in. Even then, it’s very light. You want it detailed but not hitting me over the head. It’s a tricky balance.”

The Ted Lasso Perspective

Apple TV’s Ted Lasso comes at sports as a situation dramedy. So sound designer/sound effects editor Kip Smedley has a bit more flexibility in representing the sound of English football when the show’s eponymous character tries to use his naturally sunny disposition to overcome the inexperience he was surreptitiously hired for to enable the owner’s revenge against an ex-husband and, in spite of that, builds a winning team.

Ted Lasso sound designer Kip Smedley: “[With] a TV show, we get to play up those sounds a little bit more than for a real live soccer match.”

“It’s a TV show,” he notes, “so we get to play up those sounds a little bit more than for a real live soccer match. The way we play [the audio] on Ted Lasso is a little more heightened because we can go through and put in the correct sound if something wasn’t miked correctly. We can make choices during the mix on how we want to play it: should it sound on TV like it does in reality or in a movie? We have all those options.”

So Ted Lasso viewers hear a more cinematic soundscape than they would get from broadcast sports or a documentary. However, the sounds will have started with the real thing. Smedley, who has three Emmy nominations including two for Ted Lasso, says that, as soon as he took the show on, he began tossing a soccer ball at anything he could find to start building a mental inventory of its sonic possibilities in various environments. The real sounds are augmented by the show’s Foley team, headed by Sanaa Kelley, and the combined sounds have various audio processing added during the mix process.

As with other productions, Ted Lasso’s crowd sounds were challenged by the pandemic, with crews and cast kept to a minimum onsite, particularly ahead of Season 2, which premiered in July 2021. Like broadcast-sports audio crews, which developed artificial solutions for lack of fans in the stands during the pandemic, the Ted Lasso crew found their own.

Artificial Amplification

“A big part of our workload was making these crowds, which were usually filmed with only 25-30 people, sound like a stadium of 30,000, 40,000, 50,000 people,” he says. “We had however many people they could gather on the set do the basic team chants, and then we did a lot of processing to turn those 20 or 30 people into 50,000. So a lot of delays and reverbs. And we have some special plug-ins. There’s one that I really like called Crowd Chamber from QuikQuak: you load source material into it, and a spectral or granular [processor] chops the sound up in tiny segments and sends it to different delays. We layered the original crowd recordings on top of that so that everybody can understand the words of the chants. The first two seasons, we relied heavily on that, but, for the third season, because [AFC Richmond, the show’s fictional home team] started playing more well-known teams, there were enough crowds that we could use their actual sound.”

A Big Winner

Now in its second season, HBO’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty, based on the book Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s, tells the tumultuous tale of what would become the model for the modern NBA. According to two-time Emmy Award–nominated supervising sound editor Mandell Winter, who grew up in Colorado as a Broncos and CU Buffalos fan, the show’s shifting scenes make its audio challenging.

Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty supervising sound editor Mandell Winter: “[The audio] alternates between cinematic sound, which viewers have been conditioned to want from [premium] television, and sound that’s true to the time period.”

Winning Time has its own set of SFX, thanks to the producers’ allowing the sound team access to the set. The team installed the same kind of microphone arrays that an actual NBA game has these days: on backboards and rims and, this season, on players, too. The sounds are enhanced and amplified when the play action is the focus of the scene and tuned down to a tinnier ’80s-television timbre when viewers are watching a game on a television within a television show.

“It alternates,” Winter explains, “between being cinematic sound, which viewers have been conditioned to want from [premium] television, and sound that’s true to the time period.”

The 1980s Lakers, though, never heard what they would have sounded like in Dolby Atmos 7.1.4, which the show is mixed for. Viewers, though, get re-creations of sonic landmarks from the era, including an eerily accurate Chick Hearn, the Lakers’ beloved play-by-play announcer.

“We went back and listened closely to all of that stuff from the 1980s,” says Winter. “It’s a time machine back to that era, so we want to give the audience that experience.”

Whether for a documentary or a sitcom, when it comes to sports, the sounds are so specific and so subconsciously ingrained in television viewers that the audio pros have the dual challenge of making it sound both authentic and cinematic.

“On one hand,” says Jensen, “you’re trying to achieve the qualities of emotion that movies can evoke. On the other, you’re trying to make sure that you’re accurately portraying a realistic aural landscape. That’s the line you’ve got to walk here.”

Where To Hear Great Sports Sound When There’s No Actual Game On

Streaming and cable channels offer a cornucopia of sitcoms, dramas, and documentaries on sports, and all emphasize the sounds. Here are 10 of the best:

Ballers — A series centered on a fictional group of football players and their families, friends, and handlers.

Eastbound and Down — Many years after leaving, a burned-out major-league ballplayer returns to his hometown to teach physical education at his old middle school.

Formula 1: Drive to Survive — Docuseries following the FIA Formula One World Championship across multiple seasons.

Friday Night Lights — The granddaddy of television sports dramas follows the lives of the Dillon Panthers, one of the nation’s best high school football teams, and their head coach.

Glow — A look at the personal and professional lives of a group of women who perform for a wrestling organization in Los Angeles during the 1980s.

A League of their Own — Comedy series remake of the film about the WWII All-American Girls Professional Baseball League.

Quarterback — Docuseries showcasing Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins, and Marcus Mariota over the course of the 2022 season.

Ted Lasso — Series in which American college-football coach Ted Lasso heads to London to manage AFC Richmond, a struggling English Premier League soccer team.

Welcome to Wrexham — Docuseries chronicling the purchase and stewardship of Wrexham AFC, one of professional football’s oldest clubs, by Hollywood actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney.

Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty — The professional and personal lives of the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers, one of sports’ most revered and dominant dynasties, a team that defined an era both on and off the court.