Paramount Plus’ Players captures what makes League of Legends special

polygon.com:

To the modern-day gamer, the 2005-edition Logitech G15 Gaming Keyboard — with its unwieldy size, LCD screen, and membrane keys — feels like a relic from a bygone era. It’s gaudy and embellished in all the wrong ways, a product of a time when PC gaming as an industry was rapidly evolving and everyone was still trying to find their footing in this new and strange landscape.

Inexplicably, the G15 has found new life in 2022 with a starring role in Players, a new mockumentary from American Vandal co-creators Dan Perrault and Tony Yacenda about a fictional League of Legends esports team called Fugitive Gaming. Though it’s a satire of sports docuseries like The Last Danceand Formula 1: Drive to Survive, Players works hard to capture what makes esports special, and it mostly succeeds. The specifics of League of Legends may seem daunting for those who’ve never encountered the game before, but at the core of all that is an affecting sports drama that knows exactly what it wants to be — a funny, loving, sometimes gross homage to the everythingness of professional gaming.

The first season primarily follows Fugitive’s 27-year-old veteran player Creamcheese (Misha Brooks). At the time of the show, which takes place in 2021, Creamcheese has been playing professionally for six years and has become one of the most well-known personalities in the pro scene. Still, he’s continually failed to capture the one thing that every pro player dreams of: a championship.

He’s hopeful that 2021 will finally be Fugitive’s year, but interference from team president Nathan Resnick (Stephen Schneider) sees popular Twitch streamer and teenage phenom Organizm (Da’Jour Jones, quietly compelling) being added to the starting roster on short notice in the