Last Chance U's final football season is more provocative and timely, and a welcome palate cleanser

The Hollywood Reporter

Season 5 of the Netflix reality docuseries, set at Oakland's Laney College, is "a satisfying change of pace for the franchise after two years at Kansas' Independence Community College, where Coach Jason Brown's abusive and self-aggrandizing approach made for good TV, but sucked all of the oxygen out of the locker room, rendering the actual players a near afterthought in the fourth season," says Daniel Fienberg. "So look at Last Chance U: Laney as a welcome palate cleanser, sometimes impeded by real events, but restoring balance to the franchise's focus and exhibiting an admirable willingness to tackle larger topics in the process. For Last Chance U fans, this is a season of marked contrasts. Leaving behind the small-town settings of the first four years, communities in which the football team was often the biggest show in town, our new season unfolds at Laney College, located in sight of downtown Oakland. Nobody tries pretending that Oakland lives or dies on the performance of the Laney College Eagles — the near empty stadiums on game day make that point clearly — so Whitely and company decide to instead illustrate how Laney mirrors its home city. Several episodes become an exploration of gentrification and what happens to an urban space when the people who have lived there for generations can no longer afford to stay. In this respect, it's a more provocative and timely season."

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• Season 5 feels more relevant amid the Black Lives Matter movement: "Fans of Last Chance U will recognize certain recurring elements: young, mostly Black athletes committed to a desperate bid to play at the next level; a larger-than-life white coach dashing up and down the sidelines, peppering them with invective; the ups-and-downs of each game, rendered with bone-crunching immediacy," says Scott Tobias. "And yet, the Laney College season is a significant departure for the show, feeding off a coach who is given to hugging his players and talking to them about the importance of being vulnerable and 'letting the pain out.' In its move to Oakland, the new season also sharpens the show’s focus on contemporary racial and socio-economic issues at a moment of intensified demand for better and more honest stories about Black lives like (football player Dion) Walker-Scott’s. Laney athletes struggle to avoid career-ending injuries in a violent game while juggling children, jobs and even hunger in a rapidly gentrifying city where many can’t afford to live."
• Season 5 is a calm and steady goodbye to Last Chance U's football that avoids sensationalism
• Director Greg Whiteley liked the change of pace of Laney's coach John Beam focusing on mental health with his "Yoda-like wisdom"
• Why Last Chance U is moving from football to basketball: “After Year 4, when we were looking for a new place to go, a lot of us just started thinking maybe there’s other places, even other sports, other subjects that we can try,” says Whiteley, referring to the gap between filming a second season at Independence Community College in Kansas and this one in Oakland, Calif. “Because of the success of the show, many of us have had other opportunities to explore some other stuff, and I think that combined with being really satisfied with the stories that we’ve told in Seasons 1-4, we felt like this might be a good time to say goodbye.”