I haven’t seen The Office. It’s a show that has achieved such cultural ubiquity that I feel like I don’t need to watch it, by virtue of having seen the memes and clips. My kids’ music class played the theme song for their Spring Sing. There’s the frantic little guy, and the smug guy, and the autistic guy, and that one lady who can’t tell the difference between two pictures.
Oh, and the cynical guy, and the guy who spills his beans. Or chili. Whatever.
The autistic guy, who I understand is named Dwight, is the person I see the most. Maybe even more than the frantic little guy, who is supposed to be the star, I think. I want to say, Steve Carell? I do like that clip of him saying “no” a lot.
Dwight is played by actor Rainn Wilson, about whom I know exactly three things:
1. He sometimes has bad takes on the internet.
2. Dwight.
3. He produced one of the most genuinely heartfelt, funny, and interesting documentary series I’ve ever seen and it is completely buried on Netflix.
I edit a magazine that specializes in applying research standards to weird and absurd topics for the purpose of enlightenment and education. We Are The Champions is precisely the kind of show I would watch, and precisely the kind of show I wouldn’t expect to be especially noteworthy.
After all, a lot of producers try their hand at outsider storytelling. The docu-series World of Weird plays out like a longform Vice article, inserting a hip, too-cool-for-this journalist into a patently bizarre situation where their job is to play along just enough to milk more salacious details out of the target weirdos with the tacit understanding that the presenter is like you, a normal person who doesn’t paint portraits with their flaccid penis.
Not all of the segments are bad and not all of the presenters are insufferable, but it’s exactly the sort of missable “Look Ma, an Outsider!” presentation I’ve come to expect whenever the strange and usual are on offer.
We Are The Champions is not so ghoulish as to impose a presenter as a viewer stand-in to put on a silly hat and press their genitals to the canvas with a performative “Help me!” expression. Instead, the episodes are narrated with affable dignity by Wilson’s soothing baritone. Tone, in fact, is what sets this series apart.
The episodes are shot, edited, and narrated with incredible sincerity. The struggles of a competitive frog wrangler are treated with the same gravitas you might expect for an Olympic athlete. This is precisely where a beautiful alchemy starts to take place in the show. You’re drawn in by the absurdity of the premise, of course. Chasing a wheel of cheese down a dangerous hill? Ridiculous!
But then we start to follow some of the competitors through their lives. We learn how they prepare. We learn why they care about this outlandish thing. We meet their rivals. We see what they go through to prepare.
It’s easy to imagine Rainn deadpanning with ironic seriousness about these people and their silly dreams in a way that comes off as a mean kind of funny. A taking seriously of the asinine so as to mock it and anyone who cares about it. That’s what I expected going in because frankly, when it comes to media treating social outliers with anything approaching dignity, the bar is in hell.
Instead, we’re met with a show that treats oddity and passion with the earnest dignity and wholesomeness that is more Great British Baking Show than Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.
You start the episode amused, but soon you become invested. Then, you become impressed by what people do in pursuit of these alien passions. Finally, by the end, you are nearly in tears when the frog leaps across the finish line. When the plucky young woman picks up the cheese wheeling torch from her hero. When the scrappy and relatable dark horse hot pepper eater faces her biggest challenge: An unfeeling ringer hand-picked by the guy who breeds California Reapers.
Maybe most importantly, you feel deep down within yourself a twinge of envy. “Really? Do I want to be a hot pepper icon? Do I want to risk life and limb to catch the cheese?”
No. (Well, maybe.) What I want is to be good at something. What I want is to care so much about a thing as to bend myself unto it. What I want is the will to compete and the thrill of competition.
By the time the trophies have been handed out and our stories concluded, for now, you feel like a million bucks. You are so happy for these beautiful people and their weird dreams, and that is when Rainn delivers a closing monologue over a heartfelt tinkling of piano. The exquisite delivery of these philosophical vignettes are exactly the emotional closure you need, and while they are always contextual and beautifully written, their message is always the same:
To chase something is to be brave. To embrace suffering is to be alive. That following your stupid dreams with your whole heart is achingly human and wonderful, and available to everyone. That, although we are bound to fail, the beauty is in having something to reach for:
“So let us charge, headlong, down all the insane hills.
Knowing in our hearts that one of them will be our undoing.
But not this one.
And not today.
For right now, we are alive.
And we are the champions.”
