Another go-round for ‘Last Chance U’

By RALPH D. RUSSO

AP College Football Writer

NEW YORK

The East Mississippi Community College Lions are back as the documentary series “Last Chance U” returns for a second season.

All eight episodes of season two are available on Netflix.

The first season of the documentary by director Greg Whiteley chronicled the ups and downs of the junior college football team’s 2015 season and turned out to be a hit that reached well beyond hard-core sports fans and drew people to Scooba, Miss.

“When we were filming season two, every week there was somebody showing up, and frequently they were from overseas,” Whiteley said in a phone interview with the AP on Thursday. “I remember there was this one couple from Scotland. They were on their honeymoon. There was another couple that came from Australia. These are people, they have Netflix accounts overseas, they watched the series and loved it. Didn’t know anything about American football. Didn’t care anything about American football, but just wanted to come to Scooba, Miss., and meet some of these people they fell in love with.”

Junior college football teams are typically stocked with players talented enough to be playing in Division I, but because of issues away from the field – sometimes academics, sometimes behavior problems or legal issues – they end up in small towns hoping to redeem themselves. Rosters turnover drastically from year to year so there are plenty of new faces at “Last Chance U” in season two.

Two of the biggest stars from the series are back.

Brittany Wagner returns as the pencil-pushing, strong-willed academic adviser who often stole the show, though 2016 turns out to be her last season with EMCC. Wagner left the school earlier this year to take a marketing job in Birmingham, Ala., and then started her own academic consulting firm called 10 Thousand Pencils.

Blustery coach Buddy Stephens is back and hoping for some redemption of his own, Whiteley said.

“He really felt as though, ‘I didn’t like what I saw in season one and I didn’t like what I saw in me. I need to make some changes,’ ” Whiteley said about Stephens’ receptiveness to another season of being followed by cameras.

Whiteley and his crew demand lots of unfettered access and time. He said East Mississippi was once again happy to accommodate.

Whiteley said he did not go into the project thinking it would produce more than one season, but the stories were simply too rich to let go.

“The season ended with a fight, and so we knew they were going to have to begin the next season with one arm tied behind their back in the first game. We thought that would be interesting,” Whiteley said.