Following an initial two seasons with East Mississippi Community College and then two with Independence Community College in Kansas, Netflix’s Last Chance U shifted its focus to Oakland (CA)’s Laney College for season five. That season, currently the last football-focused one scheduled (Last Chance U: Basketball is set for a 2021 premiere), will premiere July 28, and Netflix has now released a trailer for it:
As that trailer notes, the Laney Eagles are coming into this season (filmed last fall) off a lot of success. They went 11-2 in 2018 and won their first-ever California Community Colleges Athletics Association title. (However, “defending state and national champions” isn’t quite right; they’re state champions, but California schools aren’t in the NJCAA and don’t play for that national title, which was won by Season 1 and 2 subject East Mississippi in 2018. Laney’s “#1 in the nation” claim is based off Massey Statistics rankings, not on-field competition.) So that makes this much closer to the seasons 1 and 2 focus on perennial junior college powerhouse East Mississippi rather than the seasons 3 and 4 focus on Independence, a school that received a lot of preseason attention but didn’t live up to it (and that was before the coach lost his job after an “I’m your Hitler now” text and wound up charged with eight felonies after trying to intimidate journalists).
A lot of what’s drawn Last Chance U buzz in the past has been compelling characters, and it looks like this season will have at least one in John Beam, the Eagles’ football head coach (since 2012) and athletic director. That trailer shows off players talking about Beam’s 40-plus years of coaching experience and his passion to “win everything,” and it has some segments of him getting fired up. It also looks like this season will explore how Laney and its players fit in in Oakland, and that could be interesting; the previous installments of this series took place in smaller towns, so an Oakland-set one is certainly a notable change. We’ll see how S5 of Last Chance U stacks up to past seasons when it comes out on July 28.
[Netflix on YouTube]
About Andrew Bucholtz
Andrew Bucholtz has been covering sports media for Awful Announcing since 2012. He is also a staff writer for The Comeback. His previous work includes time at Yahoo! Sports Canada and Black Press.