'Welcome to Wrexham' Welcomes the PBS Crowd With Open Arms

When the second season finale of FX’s popular sports docuseries Welcome to Wrexham aired earlier this month, it came with the welcome, if unsurprising, news that fans could look forward to a third season following the Red Dragons’ adventures in the first year following their longed for and long-awaited promotion to League Two of the English Football League (EFL). The real surprise was a detail about timing: season three will arrive just a few (as yet unspecified) months from now, in Spring 2024. The two previous seasons were fall arrivals, and the timetable shift — which will likely align at least a few episodes with the EFL’s final regular season matches and all-important playoffs schedule — is another sign of FX’s confidence in the Emmy-nominated series. 

What does that have to do with you, dear readers, who are more likely to visit TellyVisions in search of your next favorite costume drama and/or crime series about a very sad man solving murders set in a picturesque village? Well, that depends. If you’ve enjoyed our occasional football coverage over the years—-Netflix’s series The English Game even marries football with costume drama!—make yourself comfortable, you’re in for a treat! If you’re skeptical but notionally open to a sports-and-Britishness combo platter, our piece on streaming films about football includes a helpful explainer on league football in the U.K. (though it seems to predate the existence of the National League, where Wrexham spent 14 largely demoralizing seasons).

Viewers with a taste for stories about scrappy underdogs (such as The Imitation Game) or proud, often looked down-upon, and geographically isolated people with tons of heart and dignity (à la All Creatures Great and Small); or those who need a little Ted Lasso fix, Welcome To Wrexham could be just the ticket! With Season 3 coming to our airwaves so soon, now is a perfect time to dip a toe into Wrexham’s delightful waters, or to dive right in to be all caught up for the next episodes.

Of course, it’s impossible to talk about Welcome To Wrexham without mentioning a certain can-do fictional coach and the team he helps to re-energize, but as easy as it is to think of this series as a Ted Lasso analog, that does too much smoothing out of the series’ appeal factors. Let’s talk about what hooks viewers and keeps us reeled in (especially in the U.S., where major-league soccer is in its infancy, popularity-wise).

We’re living in a bit of a golden age for sports documentaries and docuseries — witness the recent release of Beckham, the eight-part Michael Jordan/Chicago Bulls dynasty series The Last Dance, and the enduring popularity of ESPN’s 30 For 30 documentaries — and Welcome To Wrexham is a very well-made entry in that category. The series delivers the requisite potent combination of easy-to-root-for underdogs and the financial resources to help them to victory. The Red Dragons (a.k.a. The Reds or The Town) are the professional men’s team of an historic football club founded in 1864. They played in perfectly respectable mid-level leagues for decades, until a combination of bad luck and the UK’s depressed economy saw them tumble down the standings over several years, eventually landing the Red Dragons in a semi-professional league. By the time current club chairmen Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds became aware of Wrexham’s existence, the team had languished in the lowly National League for 14 years, trying and failing to stage comebacks even as it was subject to the whims of a variety of uninvested owners. 

Co-owners since 2021, McElhenney and Reynolds are Hollywood A-listers with an eye for big-hearted moves that will also likely develop into good businesses. McElhenney (co-creator and co-star of FX/FXX’s powerhouse sitcom It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia) — fell in love with Wrexham’s story thanks to fellow writer and football fan Humphrey Ker, and convinced Reynolds (of Deadpool snarkiness and quips fame) to join him in making an eventually successful bid to purchase the club from its understandably rather jaded supporters’ association (a supercharged version of what we’d call a fan club here in the US). 

A camera crew began documenting Rob and Ryan’s path to ownership of Wrexham AFC before Welcome To Wrexham had even been greenlit. The first season’s 18 episodes vary widely in length and narrative assurance, but that mirrors the experiences of many involved in the project. The two co-owners (though they prefer to think of themselves as club stewards) are candid about their lack of experience as sports team investors and near-total ignorance of fairly crucial things such as international football broadly, and Wales, specifically, but they turn that into fodder for justified self-mockery, paving the way for a presumed, equally ignorant American audience to embrace the adventure. 

I hypothesize that viewers stick with the show because of how easy it is to get hooked on the stories of the team (players, coaches, front-office staff) and the town itself, which is lovingly highlighted throughout season two. The second season is stronger for that shift in focus and scope as Rob and Ryan’s fun first season double-act turns to a graceful ceding of the spotlight to stories likely to forge a deeper connection with viewers. 

We can find a perhaps surprising analog in the wildly popular Netflix docuseries Formula 1: Drive To Survive. For decades, Formula 1 has been a wildly popular sport for decades basically everywhere but the U.S. Drive to Survive came along in 2019 to demystify its many technical aspects and to introduce viewers – not exclusively, but let’s say especially young female viewers – to the on-and-off-track drama of the sport. Like Drive to Survive, Welcome to Wrexham is a show built to appeal to extant devotees of the sport and football novices alike. It's approachable, and reduces the bar to entry, understanding, and fandom. It’s worked for Formula 1, which now has three races in the U.S. and boasts race attendance that far eclipses what the sport attracted five years ago. Wrexham’s shift to a very ambitious production schedule overlapping even slightly with the current season of play is a savvy one that I predict will help the series continue to build its audience. 

Welcome To Wrexham airs on FX and streams on Hulu.