There's one big surprise that any San Francisco 49ers fan should be ready for if they plan to watch the new AMC docuseries "Rise of the 49ers." 

There is a whole heck of a lot of Tom Brady on the screen.

Of course, Brady is the executive producer of this series (via his Religion of Sports production company), and it's well-known he grew up as a die-hard 49ers fan. At a red carpet event ahead of the San Francisco premiere last week, Brady's production partner Gotham Chopra said this specific project has been a long time coming from the seven-time Super Bowl champion.

"Tom is football, through and through - it's the love of his life. And I think that love was born and conceived with the 49ers," Chopra said. "... I think this is a story he's always wanted to tell, and it started to come together three or four years ago."

"Rise of the 49ers" is a four-part series on AMC that offers around three hours of content on the San Francisco dynasty. The first two episodes aired on Sunday night, with the final two slated to premiere Monday night. It seems clear the series prioritized the years that formed Brady's football life, specifically, though it does include all of the characters you'd want in a look book at the 49ers.

If you're a 49ers fan who lived through that era, the documentary will be a good trip down memory lane alongside quarterbacks Joe Montana and Steve Young, wide receiver Jerry Rice, owner Eddie DeBartolo Jr. and archival footage of head coach Bill Walsh. It even includes some lesser-known Bay Area legends like team photographer Michael Zagaris and curmudgeonly journalist Ray Ratto. 

But ultimately, the series reminded me of how the Dallas Cowboys botched the end of the 2021 season's playoff game against the 49ers. The Cowboys put on a great drive down the field but didn't realize the clock was running out until it was too late. 

The documentary effectively covers the entirety of DeBartolo's ownership, from his purchase in the mid-1970s to his forced ouster in the late 1990s. But the pacing feels herky-jerky for a full docuseries about a franchise that won five Super Bowls in a 15-year span. The five titles themselves are crammed into just two of the four episodes, and while the third episode covers the juiciest part of the decade in the Montana-Young quarterback saga, that episode focuses narrowly on the first season and a half of the saga - how the 1987 player strike and a stunning playoff loss impacted things for the team and its quarterbacks.

The series then absolutely races through the post-Walsh era, to the point that I initially wondered if there had been plans for a much longer series than what we ended up getting. The crushing loss to the Giants in the 1990 season's NFC championship - a game that combined missing out on a three-peat with Montana's career-changing injury - is covered in basically 15 seconds. The saga of Montana's departure to Kansas City dominated the Bay Area news cycle for months in real time, but it is barely mentioned in the doc.

The entire 1990s is a speedrun that will feel incomplete and almost dizzying to any fan who knows about it, let alone witnessed it. There isn't a single mention of the legendary 49ers-Cowboys rivalry from the 1990s. (In fact, Netflix's documentary on the Cowboys did a better job talking about the '90s 49ers than the 49ers doc did.) Nor is there a mention of what happened the one time Montana and Young faced off on the field in the 1994 season. 

Instead, the entire Young era is distilled into his one Super Bowl win, and Young regretting he didn't win more, before we move on to the end of the dynasty. The series doesn't really bother looking at how things ended on the field (which was mainly Brett Favre and the Packers), either, but rather focuses on DeBartolo's gambling and bribery scandal that led to his ouster as owner as the main thing that ended the dynasty.

To be clear, there are some incredible stories told throughout the documentary, and some footage that'll draw laughs. (A particularly funny archival newsclip is about the two things San Francisco was No. 1 at after the first title: being weird and football.) Like many of the recent documentaries about the NFL's history, NFL Films clearly is an indelible part of the series, with the treasure trove of old game footage still coming through crisp and sharp on the screen four decades later. Where it shines brightest is in the use of archival footage of coach Bill Walsh's meetings with the 49ers teams. Chopra said the discovery of some of these clips, which had gone unpublished until now, is what really drove Brady to make this film.

To give Brady credit, there is no doubt about the reverence Brady has for the 49ers teams and players he grew up rooting for. His fandom story is well-known to Bay Area sports fans but still gets revisited in the show, with him discussing his family's season tickets and how he cried at "The Catch" game. The best stuff comes from him showing off the depth of his fandom, like when he crashed late 49ers star Dwight Clark's dentist appointment as a child, how he celebrated a Super Bowl title and even when he recited an old commercial jingle by memory. He also references his childhood 49ers fandom en route to two barbs thrown at his old AFC East rivals. ("I don't think I could've been what I was if I grew up rooting for the Jets," Brady says to Rice at one point.)

Maybe in that way, the documentary name is more fitting than intended. This isn't a complete history of the 49ers dynasty, including their dominance in the 1990s; instead, it focuses on their rise to the top in the 1980s - formative years for the 1977-born Brady. Perhaps that explains why some major 49ers characters weren't interviewed for the film and were barely mentioned at all, most noticeably running back Roger Craig, two-time Super Bowl champion coach George Seifert and defensive end Charles Haley.

But after thinking about it, I started to understand the series likely just mirrors how Brady viewed things. After all, Brady was 10 years old for that 1987 season, the basis for the third episode. His childhood happened with No. 16 under center, with the transition to Young happening when Brady was in middle and high school. It makes sense that Brady would view those early Montana years with a reverence that's different from when he became a quarterback himself at Serra High School in San Mateo and started to prepare for his own football journey.

We see that version of Brady on camera, just like we see him a lot in this series - dozens of times across the four episodes. Brady is the main face and voice we hear in a 200-plus-second introduction to the series to start the first episode, and the series ends with Brady playing catch with Rice in the backyard of a house, saying he was fulfilling a lifelong dream by doing so.

On the red carpet at the San Francisco premiere last week, Rice laughed when asked about what that day of filming with Brady was like.

"Tom tried to break my hand, to be honest with you," Rice told SFGATE. "He was throwing footballs, and it had a lot of velocity on it. And I said, ‘Wow, I see why this guy won seven Super Bowls.' He was good, man. Tight spiral, like a missile, man. It was on you in a heartbeat, just like that."

Rice and Brady playing catch is the final full scene of "Rise of the 49ers." It's a fitting metaphor: After three hours of content, the show is mostly a look at Brady's lasting love for his childhood heroes.

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This article originally published at The new 49ers documentary features a ridiculous amount of Tom Brady.