Over the past few years, there have been some amazing sports documentaries available with a Netflix subscription. From the eye-opening The Comeback: 2004 Boston Red Sox to the streamer’s Quarterback docuseries to so many others, I’ve spent countless hours watching these engaging titles. That said, you’d expect to hear I was head-over-heels for the new Netflix original, Who Killed the Montreal Expos?, which dropped on the 2025 movie schedule ahead of the World Series. I wish that were the case…
Though I enjoyed watching Jean-François Poisson’s deep dive into the triumphant life and drawn-out death by a thousand cuts of Montreal’s ill-fated National League team, I think there is one major change that would have made this an all-star documentary. Unlike the franchise the documentary chronicles, this one thing could have saved the documentary in my eyes.
This Should Have Been A Multi-Part Documentary
Before getting too carried away, I have to give it to Jean-François Poisson and his team for finding a way to chronicle the nearly 40-year history of the Montreal Expos – the good, the bad, the really bad, and the ugly – in a little more than 90 minutes. It touches all the bases, lays out the team’s place in Montreal, Quebec, and Canada as a whole, and paints a loving portrait of the team and the players who became family over the years. That said, this should have been a multi-part documentary.
Netflix’s The Last Dance, The Comeback, and America’s Team ranged from three to 10 episodes, and that model would have benefited Who Killed the Montreal Expos. Instead of bouncing back and forth between chronicling the Expos’ place in Montreal culture and its eventual demise (this causes some serious physical and emotional whiplash) in the span of 90 minutes, allowing the story time to breathe would have made this an all-star. With so much story to tell in such a short amount of time, it felt like certain things were rushed, including the piece of Expos history that initially got me interested in the doc in the first place.
I Wish More Time Were Spent On The Shortened 1994 Season
Who Killed the Montreal Expos? is more about the team’s demise and everything that led to the relocation to Washington, D.C., prior to the 2005 season, but I wish more time had been spent on the strike-shortened 1994 MLB season and how it impacted the final decade of the team’s existence. The Expos were the hottest team in the majors with a 70-43 record, per Baseball Reference, when the season was suspended in August 1994, and they were the odds-on favorites to win the World Series that year.
Again, the doomed season is touched upon a great deal throughout the documentary, but it should have been the center point. If the documentary were split into three parts, you could have an episode covering the formation and early days of the team, a second episode about the ‘94 season, and then a final installment about everything that followed. You’d still have all the wonderful stories about Expos fans’ experiences with the team, the insanity of its final years, and everything else that went down, but with just more focus on one of the biggest what-ifs in sports history.
All in all, Who Killed the Montreal Expos was an engaging and entertaining documentary. I just think this one change could have made it even better.
