Are shows like At Home With The Furys a way of luring men into watching reality TV?

Morecambe Bay: home of Britain’s second largest natural gas field, the rare brown fritillary butterfly, and an art deco hotel that your auntie will recognise from a 1989 episode of ITV’s Poirot. Oh, and also Clan Fury, a rambunctious family of giants led by the instantly recognisable heavyweight boxer, Tyson.

This is the backdrop to At Home with the Furys, a new nine-part Netflix series that lets viewers peek behind the tasselled curtains of the Furys’ Lancashire McMansion, as Tyson tries (and fails) to deal with retirement. After taking his kids on a “jolly boys’ day in Morecambe Bay”, where they sip coffee and pose for photos with tourists, Tyson soon finds himself drawn back into the ring and the promise of a “trilogy” fight with Derek Chisora. Getting smacked in the chops in front of 60,000 people is, the show argues, easier for Tyson than forcing his unruly brood to have toast for breakfast or wear age-appropriate clothing.

On the surface, At Home with the Furys looks just like the next instalment in streaming media’s obsession with shows that offer insight into the sporting mind. For Netflix, it follows in the wake of Drive to Survive (Formula One), Break Point (tennis), Tour de France: Unchained (cycling) and Full Swing (golf). Over on Disney+, Welcome to Wrexham has followed the exploits of Ryan Reynolds’ ownership of the Welsh football club, while Amazon has its market leading All or Nothing series about Premier League football (not to mention the Tyne-Wear duet of Sunderland ’Til I Die and We Are Newcastle United). Box to Box Films, the British company behind many of these shows, has recently announced a $30m fundraising round.

open image in gallery

The impulse is simple. Sport is the ultimate present tense entertainment. The story unfolds in real time for both participants and spectators, with an urgency that makes it compelling. But behind that is both a technical grind and a human story. Half-aspirational hustle porn, half-voyeurism, getting behind the scenes of professional sports is as much like witnessing another species as a David Attenborough documentary. How do these people eat? How do they train? How do they live?

Of course, the problem with sports documentaries is that the story has, to some extent, unfolded already. Rafael Nadal had already won the 2022 Australian Open before a ball was struck in Break Point, for example, while Scottie Scheffler had romped home at Augusta before Full Swing teed off. The last two seasons of Amazon’s lavish All or Nothing series launched in the certainty that both Tottenham and Arsenal would end up on the “nothing” side of the divide. And so, despite the fact that the fight with Chisora (a man whom Fury had comfortably beaten on two occasions previously) looms large over At Home with the Furys, it’s not the heart of it.

Instead, wife Paris and their six children – who have names like Venezuela, Adonis, Prince and, inevitably, Tyson Jnr – take centre stage. Their lives, lit by the Trumpian glow of their gilded home, unfold like the Lancashire Kardashians. This sense, that we are watching something from the early-Noughties on E!, is aided by little bro Tommy Fury and his partner Molly-Mae Hague’s perma-tans and dazzling veneers. With a combined Instagram following of over 12 million their attraction to the producers is obvious. There is no plausible sporting reason for their presence (especially after Tommy’s undercard fight with Paul Bamba is called off at the last moment, leaving him stranded in Dubai like a Love Islander at the start of covid). Instead, they stroll in occasionally like Kendall and Kylie Jenner, glamorous figures forever on the periphery.

In point of fact, At Home with the Furys feels like a gateway drug, a siren singing from the rocks to lure men into the world of reality TV. After 20 seasons on E!, Keeping Up with the Kardashians ended in 2021, and, shortly after, the… really very different The Kardashians began on Disney+ (and has already run for three seasons). It is a content factory for fashion and lifestyle aficionados. Kim in her Skims, Kylie in her cosmetics; these moments are the Kardashian-equivalent to Tyson lacing up his gloves.

For all that men will defend their interest in seeing Charles Leclerc showered in champagne or Son Heung-Min on a static bicycle, as though these are fact-finding pursuits of a serious nature, these sports documentaries share all the inanity of The Kardashians. In the world of constructed reality TV, controlling the narrative is key – but sport is fundamentally uncontrollable. Djokovic gets barred from the Australian Open, PGA golfers depart for Saudi Arabia, Fury vs Anthony Joshua gets continually postponed. And so, to mitigate this central whirlwind, we see endless shots of athletes snarfing huge stacks of protein for breakfast, slaloming around cones like a Border Collie at Crufts, driving home after defeat, looking sad through the tinted windows of their Range Rover. The compelling thing about sports documentaries is how on-field greatness can be mirrored by such off-field banality.

open image in gallery

Standing at 6’9” and built like a dry-walled privy, Fury is the show’s Kim K. His prowess in the ring will draw recalcitrant boxing fans to the reality TV genre and his charisma as husband and father will keep them there. Boxers, unlike other athletes, usually only fight once or twice a year, which means that At Home with the Furys has to convince its audience that the stakes are just as high when Tyson and Paris renew their wedding vows as when Tyson touches gloves with Chisora. If they succeed, then who knows? Perhaps whole legions of burly men will next find themselves sucked into the hypnotic vapidity of Planet Kardashian.