The NFL Films documentary series NFL Icons has announced its fourth season of subjects and premiere times.
That season, airing on linear and streaming channel MGM+ will include documentaries on four Pro Football Hall of Famers: Kurt Warner (premiering Jan. 17 at 10 p.m. ET/PT), DeMarcus Ware (Jan. 24), Joe Montana (Jan. 31), and Gale Sayers (Feb. 7). Here’s a trailer for this season:
And here’s more on it from a release:
Launching during the high intensity of the NFL playoffs and concluding two nights before Super Bowl LVIX in New Orleans, Season Four will spotlight Pro Football Hall of Famers Kurt Warner, DeMarcus Ware, Joe Montana and Gale Sayers. Warner, Ware and Montana combined to play in eight Super Bowls and collect six Super Bowl championship rings, and the 2025 series will include in-depth stories on their post-season history, legacy defining moments and heart-breaking defeats. Sayers’ playing career ended prematurely in 1971 due to debilitating injuries, but his impact on the game has endured for generations.
…The docuseries, narrated by award-winning broadcaster Rich Eisen, will tell each legendary figure’s story through a combination of interviews, highlights, mic’d-up sound, and never-before-seen footage. Executive producers of NFL Icons are Ross Ketover, Brian Rolapp, Keith Cossrow, Ken Rodgers, Michael Wright, Jill Burkhart and Jessica Boddy. Paul Camarata is the series producer.
“The remarkable football players featured in NFL Icons are the embodiment of what makes the NFL so captivating to its fans” said Michael Wright, head of MGM+. “The new season, from the incredible storytellers at NFL Films and our brilliant narrator Rich Eisen, will continue to entertain and inspire audiences, both diehard football fans and the subscriber who enjoys premium storytelling.”
As with past seasons of NFL Icons, each episode will be an hour-long look at the figure involved, featuring both NFL Films archive footage and contemporary reflections from or on them. The series has produced plenty of notable moments to date, including Troy Aikman’s discussion of “hitting rock bottom as a broadcaster” and Steve Young’s “Guys can have bad dreams. I lived them” on the Snow Bowl. And it’s interesting to see the series again feature a prominent player-turned-broadcaster in Warner, who’s been broadcasting since his retirement following the 2009 season, working with NFL Network (especially, where he’s both a studio analyst and a booth analyst), Fox Sports, Westwood One, and more.
A key focus of NFL Icons versus other documentaries on these figures (even some from NFL Films, such as NFL Network’s A Football Life series) is the deep looks into the NFL Films archives. Camarata, the NFL Films supervising producer who’s the series producer for NFL Icons, spoke to AA on that last year:
“The other thing that MGM+ really values, and that we love that they value, is that they are big fans of our NFL Films archives. What that means, and what that looks like, and how it shows up on the screen, is these figures, because they are icons, because they’re all Hall of Famers (although that’s not a requirement), they are figures in NFL history that we’ve been documenting going back 50,60 years. …
“So we’re able to shine a light on those archives, and we’re able to use that space we have on the screen to show the evolution of an athlete and a human really, how someone ages on screen by showing different interviews that have been done, sometimes in five-year increments for 40 years. And that’s what they look like, what they sound like, the charm of how their fashion or their hairstyles have changed, but most importantly, how their perspectives have changed.
…”In many cases, you’ll get to track with an individual how their viewpoint about something is the same as it was 40 years ago. In other cases, it may have evolved. So I think the format really lets us stretch our legs as storytellers to give you different faces of these individuals. You know their faces, you know their names, you know their voices, and to a certain extent their stories. But we definitely feel there are elements of their stories that you don’t know that you’ll get out of a NFL Icons episode.”
We’ll see how this latest season of NFL Icons stacks up to the past ones. But they definitely have some interesting subjects here.
NFL Icons’ fourth season will premiere on MGM+ on Jan. 17 with an episode on Kurt Warner.