It Still Stings: ESPN’s Acclaimed Scripted Series Playmakers Was So Good the NFL Killed It

Editor’s Note: TV moves on, but we haven’t. In our feature series It Still Stings, we relive emotional TV moments that we just can’t get over. You know the ones, where months, years, or even decades later, it still provokes a reaction? We’re here for you. We rant because we love. Or, once loved. And obviously, when discussing finales in particular, there will be spoilers:

There are plenty of great series finales in the grand history of television, but few hit on as many levels as the absolute gut punch that ended ESPN’s short-lived, 2003 original series Playmakers.

Playmakers was a scripted series following the lives and careers of the players and coaches connected to fictional professional football team the Cougars. After a whirlwind season dealing with everything from drug addiction, injury, affairs, and abuse, the spotlight came back to the field where the Cougars anxiously waited to learn their playoff fate, which hinged on the score of a different game playing out in realtime. 

With the result they need seemingly in hand, the locker room erupts in celebration, with the players popping champagne and coaches talking up their hopes for a playoff run. But that celebration turns to quiet desperation when a late score and onside kick pulls the game within reach. All the Cougars can do in the waning moments is watch on the locker room TV helplessly as the game—and their playoff hopes—evaporate with a scramble play for a touchdown as time expires. 

It’s just stark shock and frozen silence. Until the coach walks by and utters the series’ final line.

“Turn it off.”

For a show that ended just as abruptly as the Cougars’ playoff run, it’s a fitting and brutal cut to black that still stands as one of the bravest rug-pulls in TV history. But with Playmakers’ blink-and-you-missed-it place in history, it’s also one of the easiest to forget.

Looking back two decades to the early 2000s, Playmakers came at a time of experimentation for ESPN as the network was trying to stake out its own piece of the scripted TV market. The show aired for just a couple of months in the fall of 2003, in that early-aughts sweet-spot where cable TV dramas were experimenting with just how far they could push the envelope. For Playmakers, it was a show following in the footsteps of films like Any Given Sunday (1999) and Training Day (2001), and airing on the heels of dark dramas like FX’s The Shield (2002) and HBO’s The Wire as those networks were establishing a more gritty standard for what cable could be.

Playmakers was the type of show that would have been right at home on FX or HBO, but instead landed at ESPN, a brilliant crossover for sports fans and that burgeoning audience that was almost certainly digging those hit cable dramas starting to make the awards lists. Creator John Eisendrath actually developed the project for FX, but the script stayed in developmental purgatory until it landed at ESPN after the network began looking for a flagship project to launch a hit original series.

The only problem was Playmakers turned out to be a little bit too good for its own good. It was well reported back when the series was on the air that the NFL wasn’t a fan of the show’s content, which showed pro athletes doing everything from taking drugs at halftime, covering up injuries to stay on the field, and even a subplot about a star player helping coverup a murder early in the show’s run. That spotlight only magnified when the series became an absolute cultural force that fall, a breakout watercooler hit driving the conversation heading into the NFL’s actual season.