30 for 30 remains the best place to start on ESPN+, but there’s plenty more worth watching in 2026. The Last Dance is still essential viewing for basketball fans, while In the Arena: Serena Williams, The Kingdom, and the newer Life in the W spend more time with some of the biggest athletes and teams in sports.
One thing has changed since we last updated this guide. ESPN+ hasn’t disappeared. ESPN Select is now the subscription plan specifically for ESPN+ content, while ESPN Unlimited includes ESPN+ along with ESPN’s wider collection of networks and services. Existing ESPN+ subscribers were converted into ESPN Select subscribers.
Genre: Sports documentary
Stars: Varies
If you’re only going to watch one thing on ESPN+, 30 for 30 is still the easiest recommendation. ESPN’s long-running documentary series has spent years finding great stories in practically every corner of sports, and individual filmmakers get enough room to explore subjects that don’t always fit neatly into the usual highlight-reel treatment.
The other advantage is sheer variety. You don’t need to care about every sport covered by 30 for 30 to find something here, and the ESPN+ catalog includes newer releases alongside a deep collection of older films.
There’s very little commitment involved, either. Pick whichever story catches your attention, watch it, then come back whenever another one looks interesting.
Genre: Sports documentary
Stars: Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, Phil Jackson
Even if you somehow missed The Last Dance when seemingly everyone was watching it in 2020, Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls are still an easy reason to catch up. The 10-part documentary centers on the Bulls dynasty and its final championship season while jumping back and forth through Jordan’s career and the team’s rise.
Knowing how the story ends doesn’t hurt it much. The footage, interviews, personalities, rivalries, and steadily building pressure around one of basketball’s defining teams are still what make it so watchable.
Genre: Sports documentary
Stars: Serena Williams
Serena Williams had a career big enough that squeezing it into a conventional feature-length documentary would’ve felt cramped. In the Arena: Serena Williams gets eight episodes instead, revisiting the wins, losses, injuries, relationships, controversies, and expectations that followed her from teenage phenom to one of the biggest names tennis has ever produced.
Genre: Sports documentary
Stars: Tom Brady
Tom Brady’s career has already generated enough highlights, arguments, documentaries, and statistics to exhaust an NFL fan, but Man in the Arena still finds worthwhile territory. Brady revisits the seasons and Super Bowl runs that shaped his career, while teammates, rivals, coaches, and people close to him add their own perspectives.
His longevity gives the show a huge chunk of modern NFL history to work through, particularly the Patriots dynasty and everything that came with it.
Genre: Sports documentary
Stars: A’ja Wilson, Napheesa Collier, DeWanna Bonner
One of the freshest additions here, Life in the W arrived in July 2026 and follows three of the WNBA’s most recognizable players: A’ja Wilson, Napheesa Collier, and DeWanna Bonner.
The six-part series spends time with all three on and off the court, covering the pressure, sacrifices, family lives, and responsibilities that come with playing at the top level of women’s basketball.
Wilson, Collier, and Bonner are also at very different points in their careers. Moving between them gives the show a wider view of life in the league, and it keeps the whole thing from becoming another straightforward superstar profile.
Genre: Sports documentary
Stars: Patrick Mahomes, Andy Reid, Kansas City Chiefs
The Kansas City Chiefs have spent enough time near the center of the NFL that another documentary about them could easily feel like overkill. The Kingdom works because it gives the franchise’s current dominance some historical context.
Across six episodes, it combines behind-the-scenes access from the Chiefs’ 2024 season with more than six decades of team history. Patrick Mahomes and Andy Reid are inevitably major parts of the story, but it stretches back to Lamar Hunt, the AFL years, and the long road between those early teams and the current dynasty.
Genre: Sports documentary
Stars: Hannah Hidalgo, Flau’jae Johnson, Kiki Iriafen, Caitlin Clark, Kamilla Cardoso, Kiki Rice
Full Court Press spends an entire college basketball season alongside some of the biggest names in the women’s game. Season 1 followed Caitlin Clark, Kamilla Cardoso, and Kiki Rice, while Season 2 moved on to Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo, LSU’s Flau’jae Johnson, and USC’s Kiki Iriafen.
The changing cast has helped the show grow beyond a single-season snapshot. It also catches these players during an interesting stage of their careers, when college basketball stardom can already mean national attention long before the WNBA comes calling.
Genre: Sports docuseries
Stars: Peyton Manning and guests
Peyton’s Places started with Peyton Manning wandering through NFL history with former players, coaches, celebrities, and assorted football obsessives. Five seasons later, it’s still one of ESPN+’s easiest shows to dip into when you don’t feel like committing to another sprawling sports documentary.
The idea eventually spread well beyond Peyton. ESPN has built an entire Places universe around hosts including Eli Manning, Sue Bird, John McEnroe, P.K. Subban, and Abby Wambach.
Most episodes revolve around people, locations, odd bits of history, and whatever rabbit hole the host happens to wander into. The tone stays light enough that even the history lessons rarely feel like homework.
Genre: Sports documentary
Stars: The Savannah Bananas
The Savannah Bananas were already doing something strange with baseball when Bananaland arrived in 2022. The five-part ESPN+ original follows the team and the development of Banana Ball, where unusual rules, choreography, showmanship, and crowd participation are baked into the game.
The Bananas have become much bigger since then, which gives Bananaland a second life as an origin story. Watching it now means seeing the experiment before packed stadiums and national attention turned Banana Ball into something much harder to dismiss as a novelty.
Genre: Sports talk
Stars: Pat McAfee
Most of the recommendations here are documentaries or tightly produced series, so The Pat McAfee Show has a different job. McAfee and his regular cast work through the day’s biggest sports stories with interviews, commentary, jokes, and a much looser atmosphere than you’ll get from a traditional studio show. Whether that sounds entertaining or exhausting will probably tell you whether you should watch it.
Genre: Travel, food, documentary
Stars: John T. Edge
Sports are sometimes almost incidental in TrueSouth. Hosted by writer John T. Edge, the series travels through the American South using restaurants, local personalities, food, history, and culture to tell stories about the places it visits.
After several entries centered on championships and elite athletes, TrueSouth takes the guide in a completely different direction.
Eight seasons are currently available, covering destinations ranging from New Orleans and Nashville to Austin, Charleston, and Jacksonville. Season 9 is scheduled for September 15. It’s one of the stranger fits in ESPN+’s lineup, which is exactly why it’s worth keeping here.
Genre: Sports documentary
Stars: Wright Thompson
Hosted by ESPN writer Wright Thompson, Where It Lies heads to public golf courses and spends as much time on the people and communities around them as it does on the game itself.
The 2026 series visits places including Van Cortlandt Park and Rancho Park, where golf mixes with city history, neighborhood life, local characters, and generations of regular players. The smaller scale suits the show, especially if you’ve had enough documentaries about majors, trophies, and pristine private courses.
Yes. ESPN+ still exists as a service and content library. Existing ESPN+ subscribers were converted into ESPN Select subscribers and continue to have access to ESPN+ content.
ESPN Select is the subscription plan specifically for ESPN+ content. ESPN Unlimited also includes ESPN+, along with ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNU, ESPN Deportes, and ESPN’s other networks and services.
30 for 30 is our best overall recommendation because of the size and variety of its documentary catalog. The Last Dance, In the Arena: Serena Williams, Man in the Arena: Tom Brady, Life in the W, and The Kingdom are also among the strongest standalone series currently available.
Yes. ESPN Unlimited includes ESPN+ content along with ESPN’s broader collection of networks and services. ESPN Select is the lower-tier option specifically for ESPN+ content.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?
YouTube is changing how its Home page works, giving viewers more control over what shows up there and making some of the app’s most-used sections easier to reach. Custom Feeds are now replacing the existing topic chips for eligible users, while YouTube is also testing a redesigned top bar on mobile that moves Subscriptions closer to the Home feed.
YouTube first started experimenting with Custom Feeds earlier this year, letting you type out what you wanted to watch and turning that request into its own stream of recommendations. Now, the feature is starting to look less like a side experiment and more like something YouTube actually wants people to use as part of their everyday Home page.