Final Siren review: Aussie rules get the Drive to Survive treatment

Call it earning pole position, call it serving up aces, call it riding a wave, call it kicking goals: sports docuseries have been enjoying a moment on streaming platforms of late. Since Drive to Survive premiered in 2019, not only hooking existing Formula 1 aficionados but converting other viewers into new and obsessive fans, everything from tennis, golf, surfing and cycling to athletics, gridiron and ice hockey has earned the same on-screen treatment. Now we’ve got Final Siren: Inside the AFL.

For AFL diehards, bouncing Aussie rules football into the mix has felt like just a matter of time, even if the code doesn’t boast the same international profile as many of the other pastimes given the Drive to Survive treatment.

Final Siren leaps in with a four-episode initial run – cannily timed to release a week before the start of the game’s 2026 season – that already makes its case for more.

And when a documentary is an insightful behind-the-scenes survey, taking a character-based approach to some of its key figures, their successes and their struggles, and genuinely playing like a unique window into a sport that saturates Australian media from March to September, who wouldn’t want to see it return year after year? The fact that it humanises one of the game’s most polarising current players is no small feat either.

Big names abound on- and off-screen

For existing AFL supporters, Final Siren’s drawcards are instantly evident. With an unguarded candour not usually seen in typical footy interviews and press conferences, the Western Bulldogs’ Marcus Bontempelli, Greater Western Sydney’s Toby Greene, Melbourne’s Max Gawn, Fremantle’s Nat Fyfe, the Gold Coast Suns’ Touk Miller and Brisbane’s Dayne Zorko and Cam Rayner unpack their experiences at the game’s highest level.

No matter where an audience member’s team allegiances reside, that’s an impressive array of high-profile stars. Six are current or former club captains. Four are premiership players. Two just won back-to-back cups. One is a dual Brownlow medallist. Another was a number-one draft pick.

As the ratings for the recent revival of AFL Origin demonstrated, there’s no shortage of enthusiasm for seeing the code’s top talents together, and beyond the sport’s standard structure.

That Box to Box Films is behind Final Siren adds to the series’ huge names, and gives this series another significant point of interest. While club-celebrating docos drop every season, preaching to the already adoring, Final Siren sees the production company responsible for Netflix’s long-running F1 obsession, alongside Break Point, Full Swing, Make or Break, Unchained, Sprint, Any Given Sunday and Faceoff, turn its attention to the AFL, affording it the fresh eyes of an outsider.

With regular football coverage featuring the same commentators and pundits year in, year out, and therefore the same voices and views, Final Siren feels a rarity as a result.

The personal side of the 2025 season

Charting the 2025 season won by the Brisbane Lions through the eyes of seven champions of the game from six teams in five cities across four states, the series doesn’t eschew recognisable media figures, with the likes of footballers-turned-broadcasters Jordan Lewis and Abbey Holmes among its expert talking heads.

Their main role is providing context, especially for viewers who didn’t ride every win and loss of the last year and who aren’t as familiar with the code or each player’s journey.

Bontempelli, Zorko and company relaying their own tales in their own words, and showing who they are off the field and away from the frenzy that follows all things footy, remains Final Siren’s core focus, critically so.

While the lack of an Indigenous Australian perspective among the highlighted talents is glaring, the series still touches upon many of the game’s crucial narratives.

Greene talks about his chequered history with on-field aggression, leading to suspensions, fines, hatred from opposition fans and stress for his family. How football figures are treated as public property and the abuse that’s hurled their way recurs during Zorko and Rayner’s time in the documentary’s gaze.

Final Siren also hones in on rivalries and their impacts, looking at both Greene and Bontempelli’s animosity – which is now potentially out of date following a widely publicised coffee before AFL Origin – and the QClash hostility between Zorko and Miller.

The sport’s rising fortunes in traditionally NRL-worshipping Queensland, the toll of constant contract speculation, the importance of pursuits outside of football and the challenge of weathering the shock sacking of a coach all factor in as well, as do the varying paths, some agonising, some triumphant, that can await when injuries mount and a player approaches the end of their career.

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Final Siren shows the people, not just the players

Every sport is a battle of highs and lows, the joys of victory and the distresses of falling short forever jostling. Although Final Siren isn’t as effective at illustrating that juxtaposition or the thrills of Aussie rules through its match footage – which feels disjointed even if you know the rules, scores, ladder placings, season format and finals setup going in – the clash between the code’s ups and downs still bounds through.

No one embodies that more than Fyfe, who has achieved a wealth of individual honours but missed the ultimate team prize across his 16 seasons in the game, and also endured more than his fair share of physical setbacks.

His desperation to reach the grand final in 2025, regardless of the price paid by his body, is deeply affecting to watch. Fyfe’s despair when he’s chaired off after his last-ever match, an elimination-final loss that again dashed his premiership hopes – and his comment that he felt like he was being held up because he’d failed – is heartbreaking.

Final Siren is at its best in these raw, authentic moments, when the passion and the cost is as tangible as a Sherrin’s leather; when loved ones, be it Fyfe’s partner Bridget Taylor, Greene’s then-fiancée and now-wife Georgia Stirton, Zorko’s spouse Talia or Rayner’s mother Nicole, also help lay bare how the ebbs and flows of an AFL dream echo loudly and inescapably through personal lives.

Exploring a firmly Australian code that’s fiercely beloved at home, Final Siren’s local appeal is guaranteed. Championing a style of football that’s hardly a global draw and releasing on the same day as Drive to Survive’s latest season, its international cut-through isn’t as assured.

At its best, however, when it sees people not players and rewards the game’s neophytes as much as the unshakeable devotees among its audience, this welcome series is as compelling as the GOATs of the sporting docuseries genre.

All four episodes of Final Siren: Inside the AFL are available to stream on Prime Video on 27 February.

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