The biggest hoax in sports history was a long-form comedy show starring Adam Sandler. The biggest hoax in sports history was the BCS. The biggest hoax in sports history was a major championship game between two football schools that lost money by playing the game. The biggest hoax in sports history was Manti Te’o and his fake girlfriend.

For the past several years, Schlansky has been in charge of producing episodes of the Netflix comedy series Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. But this year, the show’s writers tapped the comedian to write a new episode that explored the biggest story of the summer: the fake girlfriend hoax that ensnared Notre Dame football star Manti Te’o and nearly brought down a Heisman Trophy candidate. The project was a collaboration between Schlansky and two other comedy writers, Mano Agapion and Ian Roberts, both of whom had worked on Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt before. In an effort to capture the magnitude of the Te’o scandal, the trio took the viewer out of their comfort zone and reframed the biggest story

In the wake of Te’o’s hoax being revealed as a hoax, it has once again thrust the long-running saga into the national spotlight. But the events of the last few days also provided an opportunity for a different take on the subject. On the eve of the news breaking that Notre Dame had acknowledged Te’o’s deception, Netflix quietly released Untold, a documentary-style series that re-examines the story from an entirely new angle. The result is a confounding and engrossing watch, one that makes you not only question the veracity of what you just watched, but also what you just watched and why it matters.



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