The world of sports is filled with unforgettable highs and crushing lows. Few fan bases know this more intimately than the Boston Red Sox faithful, who endured 86 years of heartbreak before experiencing one of the most improbable and cathartic championship runs in sports history.
ESPN’s new three-part original series, Believers: Boston Red Sox, premiering today on the ESPN App for subscribers to ESPN Unlimited, explores that journey in depth.
Directed by Gotham Chopra and Lauren Fisher of Religion of Sports, and executive produced by Ben Affleck, the series explores the team’s mythology and passionate fandom.
Front Row recently asked Chopra and Fisher to talk about the making of the series.
Believers: Boston Red Sox tells a story many fans already know. How did you approach making it feel fresh and different?
Chopra: It’s a great question. I’ll start by saying that as a diehard Sox fan myself, I’ve voraciously consumed all the great series produced around the ’04 comeback. So as a storyteller, I came into this idea knowing the bar was super high. I think the approach for our series is less about what happened on the baseball diamond and more about what it meant — to the people and the place where it happened. We started with the premise that to really understand what happened in ’04, you had to understand the place where it happened, and the people from there.
And not just the fans who witnessed it or even suffered through the curse that preceded ‘04, but I mean the original New Englanders who came over fleeing persecution, to this that then persecuted others themselves (Salem Witch Trials) to the transcendentalists who re-imagined faith around Walden Pond and so on. So really, it’s less about the baseball of it all, and more about the Boston (and beyond) of it all.
Fisher: Everyone knows the ’04 Red Sox is one of, if not the, greatest story in sports history, so we didn’t set out to reinvent that. What makes Believers fresh is that the ’04 team is the spine, but the heart of the story is the fandom and the city around it. We wanted to show how devotion to a team can reach this almost mythological level, and how it couldn’t have happened anywhere else. That meant finding unique voices and approaches that reveal the Red Sox story as bigger than the game itself, tied to Boston’s history and identity.
Casting was at the heart of the show. We built lanes, like players and celebrity fans, professors and historians, cultural critics and creative Boston voices but the throughline was the same: They’re all believers (even if they’re not Red Sox fans . . . Some Yankees fans may have snuck in). That gave us passion and perspective in the same breath. – Lauren Fisher
You brought in a wide range of voices — from players and celebrities to historians and fans. How did you decide whose perspectives to include?
Chopra: You had to be there. Not just physically, but emotionally and spiritually. You had to have had perspective of what it meant to be from Boston (and New England) before 2004 and after. The celebrities and historians who contributed are fans. They’re just like us!
Fisher: Casting was at the heart of the show. We built lanes, like players and celebrity fans, professors and historians, cultural critics and creative Boston voices but the throughline was the same: They’re all believers (even if they’re not Red Sox fans . . . Some Yankees fans may have snuck in). That gave us passion and perspective in the same breath.
Sports are bigger than balls and strikes, stats and scores. Sports are about where we are from, who we are, and why we are. I really believe that and that was the underlying soul of this series. You don’t have to be a Sox fan to understand that. – Gotham Chopra
Was there a particular interview or production moment that really crystallized the heart of the project for you?
Chopra: Well, I’ll give you two. The first was when we were pitching it and my producing pal Ben Affleck gave a one-man Shakespearian performance on what it meant to be from Boston and a fan of this team. It was epic and Oscar-worthy. Actually, that’s a bad reference because it wasn’t an act. This guy lived it and his ability to articulate what that ‘04 team meant to that place (and all of us) was as good as it gets.
The second one was the interview with Doris Kearns Goodwin, perhaps the foremost historian of our times who spoke with such whimsy, charm, frustration, cynicism and eventually euphoria about what it meant to be from Boston and a Sox fan and gave it a context only she could. I was smitten.
Fisher: In the beginning of production, there was still some question about what we meant when we said we wanted to explore the “religion” of the Red Sox. Early on we interviewed everyday fans on the streets of Boston, sitting in Fenway seats we placed around the city, sort of like those interviews in “When Harry Met Sally” with real couples. Bill and Aaron, two from a multi-generational Sox family, stood out and are so good in the show. Aaron described being a kid, staring up at the Green Monster in awe. In post, we brought that memory to life through animation, turning the wall into something mythic. That blend of real fan storytelling and visual language captured exactly what we were after: The Red Sox as more than a team, as a kind of faith passed down through generations.
What do you hope audiences — whether lifelong Sox fans or even people new to baseball — will take away from Believers?
Chopra: Sports are bigger than balls and strikes, stats and scores. Sports are about where we are from, who we are, and why we are. I really believe that and that was the underlying soul of this series. You don’t have to be a Sox fan to understand that. If you’re a Cubs fan, you get it. If you’re a Philadelphia Eagles fan, you get it. If you’re an Argentina soccer fan, you get it. In fact, if you’re a fan at all, you get it. We plan on doing more of these because these aren’t stories about sports, they are stories about us.
Fisher: For Boston fans, I hope this feels like coming home. For everyone else, I hope it sparks that same feeling you get when you realize, ‘Oh yeah, I belong to this thing, too.’ Because we’ve all got our version of Believers
