“What do you think it is about Cassius that makes him able to do things that other men find impossible?” Malcolm X (Michael Ealy) asks Muhammad Ali’s stalwart trainer, Angelo Dundee (Giovanni Ribisi), in Prime Video’s stylistically conventional yet unusually insightful The Greatest. “What spark inside him makes him so different from other people?”
These questions fuel the series, streaming in full on Nov. 4, which finds in the relative newcomer Jaalen Best an ideal young Cassius Clay, a bold boxing phenom on a quest to become the heavyweight champion of the world—and a spiritual journey that will change both his faith and his name. There are reasons to be skeptical of this show. It counts his widow, Lonnie Ali, among its executive producers. (Michael B. Jordan, who played the Ali-esque title character in the Creed movies, is another.) Such projects can default to hagiography. And Ali has already been portrayed many times on screen. But creator Ben Watkins (Cross) doesn’t dodge the tougher aspects of his subject’s life. What justifies this retelling is not only the care he and Best take in recounting what Ali achieved, but also conveying what made him capable of greatness.
The Greatest is bookended by career highlights: the 1960 Rome Olympics, where Ali won gold at 18, and his first heavyweight championship in 1964. That fight, against Sonny Liston, must be his most extensively documented moment. Michael Mann opened his 2001 biopic Ali, starring Will Smith, with an immersive restaging of the match. Regina King’s 2020 film One Night in Miami imagines its afterparty, a meeting of the minds between Eli Goree’s Ali, Malcolm X, Jim Brown, and Sam Cooke. In ending where these predecessors begin, the series traces how the upstart Cassius Clay crafted Muhammad Ali, the legend.
Best’s Ali reads as a significantly younger man than the versions in Mann’s and King’s movies. Instead of detracting from his astonishing self-possession, Cassius’ fresh face makes those qualities seem more remarkable. Upon his return from Italy, where he enjoyed a relative reprieve from anti-Black racism, to his segregated hometown of Louisville, Ky., he is again a teenager in his parents’ humble household. He has a mutually adoring bond with his mother, Odessa (Dana Gourrier, excellent), a domestic servant who wants nothing fancier than to give her children a better life. His father, Cash (Omari Hardwick), had dreams of becoming a great artist but settled for painting signs and drowning his disappointment in alcohol and women. Cassius’ younger brother Rudy (Kai Parham) is also a boxer. But any rivalry is outweighed by Rudy’s sincere wish to help a sibling he recognizes as a generational talent.
An 18-year-old rocketing to the top of a lucrative sport is sure to meet many people eager to buy stock in his future. Especially if he is Black and working-class, he’ll be treated as though he owes them something. As he prepares to go pro, Cassius is swarmed by this type. “I knew you had the skill,” one tells the gold medalist. “Wasn’t sure you had the work ethic.” The prejudice underlying this comment would be obvious even if we didn’t see Cassius exhaust himself in training sessions. But he knows he deserves respect, and he refuses to work with anyone, Black or white, who tries to humble him. This can look like arrogance, but it’s also an accurate self-assessment. As Angelo puts it: “You don’t teach Michelangelo how to paint.”
How does a person as systemically disadvantaged as Cassius come to believe so fervently in himself? Watkins offers three compelling explanations, all implied through his behavior rather than overstated via exposition. One is the strength of his will—his innate ability to tune out skeptics and distractions. Another is his mother and brother’s unwavering love, which counteracts the hatred he experiences. Finally, in rare instances when his poise wavers, he can fall back on the rhyming, boasting showmanship he gleans from the flamboyant pro wrestling heel Gorgeous George (WWE alum Chris Jericho, in an apt cameo).
Cassius’ singular personality is thrown into relief by Sonny (Amin Joseph), who is depicted as his antithesis in life as in the ring. An ex-con and abuse survivor, he has internalized every monstrous caricature of Black manhood Cassius actively resists. Even as the champ, with the love and guidance of a canny wife (Erica Tazel), he’s poisoned by self-hatred. Ultimately, he behaves like the beast a racist press makes him out to be. Watkins lets us sit in discomfort, watching Cassius use the same stereotypes (“big, ugly bear”) to taunt Sonny.
The Greatest rarely deviates from the bio-drama template, with its archetypal hero’s journey. But the approach suits this story of a man figuring out who he is and what he values through a noble quest. It’s when the show tries to loosen up, as in boxing montages scored to energetic hip-hop that feel like Gatorade ads, that it rings false. It occasionally struggles to balance complex truths. On the Nation of Islam, it makes clear-eyed distinctions between Malcolm X, framed as a true mentor to Cassius, and the tactics of polarizing Nation leader Elijah Muhammad (Hill Harper). Yet in illustrating why Cassius chooses the Nation’s militance over turn-the-other-cheek Christianity, hurting his mother in the process, it minimizes the Black church’s centrality to the civil rights struggle.
Even so, as it distinguishes Malcolm from Elijah, Odessa from Cash, Angelo from a legion of white guys with dollar-sign eyes, and most of all Cassius from Sonny, The Greatest builds a strong case for integrity as the key ingredient of greatness. A hero of Ali’s magnitude doesn’t just embody that virtue. He demands it from the people who surround him.
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