Sound mixer Mark Jensen was one of several Emmy Award winners for Season 1 of the FX reality series “Welcome to Wrexham.” But heading into Season 2 of the hit show from producers Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney, Jensen wasn’t ready to rest on his laurels.
“After going through Season 1, I asked that we go to the stadium and record the crowd directly because I realized in English football, the crowd is a massive part of what the entire event sounds like,” Jensen tells Gold Derby in an exclusive video interview as part of our Meet the Experts: Sound panel. “I think we now have almost 20 hours of the stadium to work with. And having that for Season 2 just opens up so many vistas of what we can do anytime there’s a little bit of a lull in the action – there’s much meat here to work with. So that was the big sea change between seasons. We now have the sound of the stadium and we can make people feel like they’re there in an immersive situation.”
Now in its third season, “Welcome to Wrexham” focuses on the Wrexham A.F.C. football club, the third oldest professional football (or soccer for American readers) team in the world. The show follows the team through its ups and downs and tracks how Reynolds and McElhenney map out the club’s future in the working-class city of North Wales that the team calls home.
“Welcome to Wrexham” is an underdog story and that was never more apparent on the FX show than in the second season’s seventh episode, during the FA Cup. The event pits all the clubs against each other in a knock-out style tournament, meaning even the top teams could lose to those in the lower tiers. In the episode, Wrexham A.F.C. loses its match to a team that, on paper, is much more talented. But the team played close and won a moral victory that drove Reynolds to tears in the locker room.
“That episode is one of the best episodes of episodic television I’ve ever worked on and I’ve been doing this for almost 30 years,” Jensen says. From a sound perspective, the episode required much attention and detail – with the action frequently cutting between audio sources. For instance, one sequence jumps from a news studio to how that newscast sounds in a bar to how it sounds in someone’s home.
“There were so many little things where I was like, ‘Oh, that’s dope. Oh, that’s cool. Oh my god, this was amazing,’” Jensen says. “That episode was perfect.”
Jensen loves “Welcome to Wrexham” and says it’s obvious viewers do as well based on his interactions with neighbors and acquaintances.
“It’s fun to work on a show that everybody knows and sees and has a good opinion of,” he says. “When you work on a lot of reality stuff it’s like, ‘Oh, you work on that show.’ There’s a little bit of that attitude. This show, all my hipster friends are like, ‘Bro!’”
“Welcome to Wrexham” from FX streams on Hulu.
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