Watchable the week of January 25, 2021

We Are: The Brooklyn Saints (Jan. 29, Netflix)

Sometimes the pursuit of the American Dream comes in modest increments, a few yards at a time on a makeshift football field.

In this docuseries, directed by Rudy Valdez (an Emmy winner in 2019 for “The Sentence”), football is not the be-all and end-all but a means to an end; for the mainly Black families whose sons play on the Brooklyn Saints youth teams, football scholarships are their only hope of sending their kids to college.

This is primarily a story of fathers and sons, although the mothers are around, cheering from the sidelines or helping ferry the boys to practice. These dads are frank about the less than ideal circumstances of their own upbringings — absent fathers, poverty, other unspecified troubles — and the fact they want their sons to avoid their own mistakes, to stay in school and away from the streets.

None are more enthusiastic than surrogate dad Gawuala, who doesn’t have a kid of his own on the team but is singularly devoted to the 9 and unders he coaches. One of the most affecting scenes involves Gawuala explaining how a tragedy in his past has invested his coaching with extra meaning, and it’s heartbreaking when he realizes that taking a badly needed job means he can no longer work with “his” kids.

Despite a relative lack of economic privilege — these families are not from the parts of Brooklyn that are gentrified hipster hangouts — the children seem to be rich in love. 

They include 9-year-old quarterback D-Lo, whose quiet intensity belies his age; 8-year-old Aiden, who idolizes his older brother, who’s about to leave for college; and 13-year-old Kenan, who loves football but wants to be an engineer.

The players are taught that football comes third after school and family responsibilities, and that the main purpose of playing is to have fun. There are tears and frustrations after losses, but the boys are told to hold their heads up and learn from the experience.

It’s a heartfelt series and it leaves you rooting for these kids to get everything they want out of life.

“People are gonna look at you and they’re waiting for you to mess up,” Coach Vick tells his son, D-Lo. “As long as you do right there ain’t nothing you can’t have.”

The Long Song (Jan. 31, 10 p.m., PBS)

“The Long Song” opens much as you might expect a “Masterpiece” period drama to open: on a scene of gentility and grace; a grand house, its vast porch shaded by palm trees, the camera lingering on the dressing table of its mistress as harp music plays. A Jamaican-accented narrator speaks of how the life of that “white missus” is “surely full of tribulation” then, as the white woman comes into view screeching for her maid, says tartly, “If that is the story you wish to hear, be on your way.”

Indeed, the white characters in this three-part series are only important insofar as their behaviour affects our real heroine, July (Tamara Lawrance), and her fellow slaves in 1830s Jamaica. And those white characters often behave monstrously, as you would expect in a series that focuses on the Black workers whose stolen labour enriches the English owners of the island’s sugar plantations.

July is born of the rape of her mother, field worker Kitty (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), by a Scottish overseer and comes into the possession of Caroline Mortimer (Hayley Atwell) after Caroline, charmed by July’s childish prettiness after spotting her on the road, takes her from her mother as casually as if she was scooping up a cute kitten. 

But the story, based on the novel by Andrea Levy, who was of mixed-race Jamaican and British heritage, doesn’t treat July as merely a passive victim. Smart, resourceful and spirited, she finds subtle ways to get around her mistress and even claims Caroline’s new husband Robert (Jack Lowden) as her own, finding real happiness with him — although it doesn’t last. 

“The Long Song” spares the viewer graphic depictions of physical violence, but July experiences plenty of emotional trauma. The worst of it is inflicted by Caroline, despite her long, symbiotic relationship with July, and Robert, a hypocrite whose vocal support of the abolition of slavery doesn’t extend to marrying the Black woman he claims to love.

Nonetheless, July endures and gets to tell her story in her own words. She is a compelling heroine, bringing a welcome, fresh perspective to the standard lily white fare of “Masterpiece.”

The Lady and the Dale (Jan. 31, 9 p.m., HBO/Crave)

For awhile in the mid-1970s, Elizabeth Carmichael was one of the most famous women in America. She was the upstart car company owner who planned to beat GM and the other big automakers at their own game with a three-wheeled car known as the Dale.

If you’ve never heard of Liz or the car, you’re not alone. Neither had I, even though she was on the front pages of magazines and newspapers all over the U.S., and the Dale appeared on “The Price Is Right” in 1974.

But it’s also possible you’ve heard of Liz in another context, as the subject of a 1989 episode of “Unsolved Mysteries,” in which she was described as a fugitive by the name of Jerry Dean Michael, an Indiana man who allegedly ran guns for Fidel Castro, was indicted for counterfeiting in the 1960s and might have had mob ties.

Alas, the dream of the Dale, which was envisioned as a high-mileage solution to the 1970s oil crisis, fell apart. Liz and other officers of the 20th Century Motor Car Corporation were convicted of conspiracy and theft charges when they were unable to reimburse angry customers who’d paid up front for cars that never got built.

But the doc — directed by Nick Cammilleri and trans woman Zackary Drucker, and produced by the Duplass brothers — makes a convincing argument that the case against Liz was motivated, at least in part, by transphobia. The media of the day, in their prejudice and ignorance, claimed Liz was merely posing as a man to mitigate the criminal consequences. In fact, Dick Carlson (father of Fox News talking head Tucker), the reporter who outed Liz’s previous identity, continues to this day to misgender her. And when she was caught in 1989 and finally served her sentence for her conviction in the Dale case, she was put in a men’s prison.

Liz had been living as a woman for years, had begun gender reassignment surgery and was accepted as a loving mother by her five children with wife Vivian. And she continued to live as a woman until her death in 2004.

As transgender historian and author Susan Stryker says in the series, it’s hard to think about Liz as a role model. She was a convicted criminal who spent much of her life on the run from the law. But “there’s something really compelling about Liz’s story as a survivor,” Stryker adds, a statement with which I wholeheartedly agree.

I’ll leave the last word to Liz’s daughter Candi: “The woman was a woman. The car was a car.”

Odds and Ends

Discovery Canada specializes in a subgenre of television that’s all about men and machines battling the elements. Think shows like “Heavy Rescue: 401” and “Highway Thru Hell.” The latest is “Mud Mountain Haulers” (Jan. 25, 10 p.m.), which chronicles the toils of brothers Craig and Brent LeBeau and their employees as they log the Shuswap region of British Columbia. If you like shows about messy and sometimes dangerous jobs and the people who do them, have at ‘er.

CBC and CBC Gem have Season 4 of “Burden of Truth” (Jan. 28, 8 p.m.), with lawyers Joanna (Kristin Kreuk) and Billy (Peter Mooney) fighting for a woman whose home is threatened by a resource company that wants to reopen a dormant mine.

CTV and Crave have “In This Together: A Bell Let’s Talk Day Special” (Jan. 28, 7 p.m.). The annual special highlighting mental health awareness has a particular focus on how people are coping during the pandemic. Hosted by Melissa Grelo and Tyrone Edwards, the show features appearances by actors and singers like Alanis Morissette, Aisha Alfa, Alan Doyle, Malin Akerman, Mayim Bialik and more. CTV Sci-Fi Channel has the Syfy series “Resident Alien” (Jan. 27, 10 p.m.), starring Alan Tudyk (“Firefly”) as an extraterrestrial who crash-lands on Earth with a mission to kill all humans.