NFL – HBO Sports and NFL Films will follow not one, but two NFL franchises with Hard Knocks: Los Angeles, an unprecedented iteration of the beloved docuseries that will deliver unfiltered, all-access looks inside the training camps of the Los Angeles Rams and Los Angeles Chargers.
The 18-time Sports Emmy Award-winning series will debut Aug. 11 at 10 p.m. ET exclusively on HBO.
The timing couldn’t be better. After the Rams returned to Southern California in 2016, the Chargers moved north from San Diego to join the Rams in L.A., exercising a one-year option created by the Rams’ move west and making the city a two-team market for the first time since 1994. Though the two teams spent 2017 through 2019 12 miles apart, they were destined to become neighbors in the same complex in Inglewood by 2020. With the upcoming opening of the $5 billion SoFi Stadium, that vision becomes reality, and NFL Films will be there to capture it all.
“The Hard Knocks franchise continues to excel as the preeminent sports reality series,” HBO Sports EVP Peter Nelson said in a press release. “Our partnership with NFL Films, which dates back to 1977, consistently produces groundbreaking television programming. We are grateful to the Chargers and Rams organizations to be able to present the 2020 training camp experience.”
Nice to see that HBO Sports EVP Peter Nelson took some time off from sabotaging his girlfriend’s podcast career to give that quote.
It’s bound to be an odd season of Hard Knocks regardless of who the league picked. Pandemic issues, civil unrest, all of these things would weigh heavily on the sports fan equivalent of a Bravo reality show.
At the same time, this does feel a bit punchless. Los Angeles fans barely care about the Rams, possibly dead in the water after a Super Bowl hangover season that saw them lose even more talent, including star Todd Gurley, in the offseason. They care even less about the Chargers, a team who could be interesting for fantasy football this year but one that would regularly have its home stadium drowned out by other NFL teams’ local Los Angeles fans. Maybe rumors of a Colin Kaepernick signing would bump up their intrigue level but it’s not the most exciting sell otherwise.
It probably doesn’t matter who you put on Hard Knocks given how much NFL fans will be jonesing for any sort of football content by the time the show rolls around. We’ll still find the wacky third-string tight end to root for and the vintage “rookies forced to sing” montage. We’ll still get the “aging player who seems nice and you probably don’t want to get cut” who gets cut and the guy you like who makes the practice squad that we never hear of in real life again. But it still seems like the Indifference of Los Angeles Sports Fans deserves a guest star credit for this upcoming season.
P.S., There’s something equally fun and stupid about the main picture I used here from our photo provider who doesn’t have a ton to offer in terms of pictures of both Rams and Chargers players. See if you can guess what it is.
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