In reply to Bjartur i Sumarhus:
I agree, I finished watching it last night and ended up very underwhelmed. I actually ended up fast-forwarding quite a bit. I'm not quite sure who the target audience was.
It suffered badly from not having access to UAE, so Pogacar was just a comedy villain. And it focused too much on FdJ - though I understand why, so can forgive that.
But mostly it suffered from being horrendously overdramatized.
Like painting WvA having a bad day in the mountains as a major disaster, yet Vingegaard was already 2.5 mins ahead and ended up losing no time that stage.
And David Gaudu catching up to G on the ascent to Hautacam ("he's going to get on the podium!" DRAMATIC MUSIC), but G had nearly a minute on him, didn't lose any time, and everyone knew that G would destroy Gaudu in the following time-trial, which he duly did. So G ended up keeping his podium place by a whopping 5 mins. Some drama.
The language was a major issue. Many of the fly-on-the-wall segments had people switching from their natural languages to English clearly for the benefit of the camera (the only exception was French, naturally). It came across as super fake. Dubbing talking heads in a studio is fine, but for fly-on-the-wall segments, subtitles capture the moment much better IMO. And the less said about the overdubbed commentary on the race segments, the better.
Finally, all the studio-based talking heads were clearly recorded weeks after the race, and were reading scripted and dramatised comments in the future tense to give the impression that the they were being interviewed during the race e.g saying "I'm really worried about tomorrow, it's going to be really hard" when 'tomorrow' was actually several weeks ago. Once you twigged this, you didn't really believe a word they were saying (although some of them were actually very good actors - Christoph Roodhooft deserved an Oscar, he hammed things up for Belgium and was the star of the series, for me!).
On the positive side, there were a few amazing moments captured which caught the spirit of the race which is not so often seen. The sight of Fabio Jacobsen struggling to making the time cut on a mountain stage, with all of his teammates waiting for him at the finish line, screaming encouragement at him as the clock ticked down, was amazing. Then seeing him almost completely collapse with exhaustion when he made it, and the tears of relief and concern shed by his teammates, was very emotional.
And several riders came through as proper interesting characters (Jasper Philipsen, the aforementioned Jacobsen, and of course G).
But all in all, a disappointment.
Post edited at 12:17
