With six episodes released thus far and four more to go, “The Dynasty: New England Patriots” on Apple+ has already generated a ton of buzz.
The docuseries takes an in-depth look at the 20-year run that Bill Belichick, Tom Brady, and Robert Kraft forged together in New England and features dozens of new interviews. Director Matthew Hamachek joined the latest episode of Eye On Foxborough to offer a behind-the-scenes look at the show.
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One decision that’s raised a few eyebrows is a lack of screen time for New England’s Super Bowl 38 and 39 victories, which only get a few minutes in Episode 3. Hamachek said he “completely” understands that perspective from Patriots fans wondering why they didn’t get more time, and that the reasoning was relatively simple: The stories have already been covered at length.
“They’ve been covered by NFL Films. They’ve been covered by ‘Three Games to Glory.’ Tom Brady covered them in his 10-part doc series,” Hamachek said. “So the beginning of this story is about the Little Engine That Could, or the David that turns into Goliath. David slays Goliath and becomes Goliath. I’m sure as a fan this is not what anybody wants to hear, but I just felt like those Super Bowls had been covered so well by a bunch of other people that it wasn’t advancing our question that much to continue to go into them.”
Hamachek said they actually started preparing for the 2003 season — which included the arrival of Rodney Harrison — but then opted to go in a different direction.
“We even started to cut the Lawyer Milloy leaves and Rodney Harrison comes in and then it’s like OK, here we go,” Hamachek said. “We’re going to cover the practice where Rodney throws his helmet at somebody and the whole team piles up on top of him and then everybody says, ‘That was the moment when…’ And you guys know that story. Anybody listening to this podcast knows that story. And there’s a reason: It’s been told so much. So I just didn’t feel like we needed to tell that story again because I think what we had captured was episodes 1 and 2 and then 3, which was really the idea, the concept of team-first… I feel like we had gotten a good sense of the culture and what worked so well to create those three Super Bowls.”
Hamachek also said that he thought other episodes were able to showcase Belichick’s brilliance in different ways and how the team felt about him at the time. Whether that was Matt Cassel going 11-5 in Episode 5 or the team rallying around Belichick in Episode 4 during a post-Spygate locker room speech, Hamachek felt those were newer ways to illustrate things.
