Keeping a long-running TV show fresh is not easy.
Far too many series start brightly only to then fizzle out and lose the viewer long before the studios decide to cancel. Only those able to maintain a strong story-telling narrative and characters the audience care about will survive and thrive.
Which brings us to Welcome to Wrexham, the documentary charting Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney’s ownership of a British football club. Series four starts this week on FX in the United States and Disney+ in the UK, nudging the show towards the elder statesmen bracket of sports documentaries.
Sunderland ‘Til I Die, the inspiration behind McElhenney’s original seed of an idea following a recommendation from Humphrey Ker, lasted just three series spread over seven years, with even the final part of that trilogy early last year feeling like something of a tag-on.
Amazon Prime’s All or Nothing has featured Arsenal, Manchester City and Tottenham Hotspur, but none went beyond a first series, while the decline in the once-excellent ‘Class of 92’, which charts Salford City’s fortunes under the ownership of former Manchester United stars, has been marked. As reported by The Athletic this week, though, David Beckham and Gary Neville are taking over the League Two side.
Welcome to Wrexham’s attempts to avoid falling into the same trap are helped by their celebrity co-owners knowing a thing or two about longevity.
How to watch Welcome to Wrexham series four
- U.S. Premiere: FX, May 15, 9 p.m. ET
- U.K. Premiere: May 16 on Hulu and Disney+
- Stream (U.S.): Fubo (try for free)
Not only did Reynolds’ film Deadpool & Wolverine last year earn more than $1.3billion at the box office as fans flocked to watch the third instalment, featuring cameos from Wrexham duo Ollie Palmer and Paul Mullin, but McElhenney’s It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is the longest-running sitcom in the U.S., with a 17th series on the way.
As executive producers, the pair bring that know-how to Welcome to Wrexham in its fourth year. There are new characters from the community to bring the human element that has made the show such a success.
Wrexham, gearing up for a first season in League One for 19 years as series four gets underway, no longer being the biggest fish in their divisional pond is another topic explored in the two episodes made available to the media before the May 15 launch in North America.
Series four also has familiar elements. So the audience again gets to meet breakout stars such as Wayne Jones, the landlord of The Turf pub, and Declan Swans lead singer Michael ‘Scoot’ Hett.
Ker, now the club’s community director after stepping back from day-to-day operations, also makes a return, this time training for a marathon that Reynolds and McElhenney have mischievously entered him for in the name of charity.
“I hate Rob and Ryan,” Ker deadpans to the camera when being put through a pre-training medical by club staff. “Nothing to do with running — just got to know them.”
Then, of course, there’s the owners. Work commitments meant visits to Wrexham were restricted during the 2024-25 season covered by filming, with McElhenney attending five games and Reynolds four.
But they are still front and centre here, linking the narrative with a series of quips when interviewed side-by-side in the States. There are also the board meetings that are invariably conducted over Zoom due to how various directors are in different time zones.
Like the dressing-room footage featuring Phil Parkinson in various stages of potty-mouthed anger that proved so popular with viewers, this peek behind the curtain as to how a sports club is run is both insightful and fascinating.
Again, there’s plenty of humour. “Is the grass human hair?” asks an incredulous Reynolds after being told a planned new pitch will cost £1.7million.
But this is also clearly a serious business, with chief executive Michael Williamson warning his bosses: “If this goes wrong, it’s a very expensive wrong.”
The stakes being so high makes the football no laughing matter. This, though, doesn’t prevent there being a few amusing moments, with manager Phil Parkinson unwittingly channelling his inner Danny Dyer an early highlight.
Parkinson’s language features as always (Andrew Redington/Getty Images)
“A proper tear-up,” predicts the Wrexham manager in the away dressing room before kick-off at big-spending Birmingham City, by way of warning his players what to expect.
Close your eyes and it could be Dyer’s character Tommy Johnson, a football hooligan who lives for fighting at the weekend in the British film The Football Factory, issuing pre-match instructions to the team. Sadly for Wrexham, it was they who took the battering at St Andrew’s as the home side ran out comfortable winners.
Parkinson, in fact, is calmness personified in these first two episodes. Certainly compared with those X-rated team-talks the producers dubbed ‘Parky’s Enthusiasm Levels’ in series one.
This is likely to be only temporary. These first two instalments in an eight-part series cover only the opening six games of the League One season, at the end of which Wrexham still topped the fledgling table despite that loss to Birmingham.
Those who relish Parkinson’s dressing-room tirades — and surely that’s most of us — will be served well in the weeks to come as the pressure mounts.
Birmingham, of course, feature strongly. A decent-sized chunk of episode two, ‘High Hopes’, focuses on the September meeting at St Andrew’s that was attended by McElhenney, Tom Brady — in his guise as a minority shareholder in the home club — and David Beckham.
There’s a “George Orwell 1984” moment when Brady greets McElhenney on the pitch, as the Welcome to Wrexham camera crew film the camera crew following the all-time NFL great for an Amazon Prime documentary on Birmingham, just as the two clubs’ respective media teams also capture the moment on their phones.
The exchange also offers McElhenney, on being presented with a blue Birmingham jersey, the opportunity to later tell the camera: “I can’t find a trash can big enough.”
A criticism The Athletic has had in the past, particularly with regards series three, was the product placement of sponsors.
We get why. As one supporter succinctly put it when taking us to task over a review at an early season match: “They can put a shot of a United Airlines plane on screen for the full half-hour if it keeps the money coming in.” But it can still grate.
Sports documentaries tread a thin line between entertainment and advertisement, and the moment viewers feel turned off, then there’s a big problem. Happily, any shoe-horning of sponsors into the narrative this time around feels less crude and more part of the storytelling.
Welcome to Wrexham has been central to the club’s rise from non-League. Wrexham have never earned a penny from the show directly, but the global spotlight provided by the cameras has helped bring in all those blue-chip sponsors that, in the latest accounts (2023-24), helped turbo-charge turnover to a club record £26.7million.
This huge commercial value explains why the club, through Wrexham Holdings, made a £2.4million contribution towards promoting the show across that same 12-month period to June 30, 2024 (£1.3million of that sum remained outstanding at the financial year end, according to the accounts).
The commissioning of a fifth series would, therefore, be news worth toasting at the SToK Cae Ras.
Viewing figures will no doubt be the deciding factor, but — spoiler alert — a third consecutive promotion to move to within one level of the Premier League surely can’t do any harm.
Let’s hope so, as moving into the land of parachute payments and arguably the most competitive division around means there’s plenty more to come from this remarkable story.
Welcome to Wrexham, series four, launches on May 15 in the U.S. on FX, streaming the following day on Hulu. The UK premiere is May 16.
(Top photo: Kya Banasko/Getty Images)
