Meet the local producer taking you behind the scenes of the Eagles season on HBO’s ‘Hard Knocks’

On Tuesday, the final episode of HBO’s in-season Hard Knocks show following the NFC East will debut, which will encompass the Eagles’ season-ending loss to the San Francisco 49ers in the wild-card round.

The season didn’t end the way that Eagles producer Shannon Furman may have hoped, but the final episode is a 50-minute look inside the Birds’ final game.

Furman is the mastermind behind the Eagles’ segments of the show. Because the in-season Hard Knocks is released on the Tuesday the following week, Furman said it’s important for the film crew to come in with a plan each week on which players to spotlight.

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Unlike the training camp edition, this year’s in-season Hard Knocks covered the entire division, leaving the Eagles with approximately 12 minutes to fill on the show every week, edited down from several dozen hours of footage per week.

“It’s so tough with the Eagles, because there’s so many guys and there are so many choices,” Furman said. “It ends up happening, like, ‘Who has an event this week? Who’s doing something?’ Week 1, it was like, ‘Let’s follow the quarterback,’ and then we had heard everybody saying Jordan Davis was a big personality.”

The team filming the footage sent it in batches to the editing team in Mount Laurel each day leading up to Tuesday’s release date, flagging segments it particularly liked or thought would be good to include. Sometimes, like after the Monday Night Football loss to the Chargers in November, the filming crew submitted the last of the footage after midnight, less than 24 hours before the episode aired.

There’s so much footage that often gets cut for time or is reused later. Furman said the Hard Knocks team shot a lot of footage of Davis for the first episode, which was released on Dec. 2, that got cut because of time restraints. But she loved the segment so much that they eventually worked him into a later episode.

Hard Knocks also mics up players during games, and the game footage caps the episode. Furman quickly learned that some players were much better mic’d up than in an interview setting, like DeVonta Smith.

“He’s a quiet guy off the field, and then he gets on the field and he turns into a completely different person,” Furman said. “Everybody is a little bit different. Some people stay completely the same. Some people get more quiet when they’re on the field than they are when they’re off, so you just get to see all different sides of people.”

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Furman hoped that the show provided a new look into the team beyond what spreads on social media. She was struck most by the passion the players had for coach Nick Sirianni, and how much they respected and related to him personally.

“As a person who grew up in Philadelphia, learning about Nick, he is Philadelphia,” Furman said. “Everyone should love this guy, because he is the definition of our city, the fiery, where maybe it comes across as arrogance at times, but at the same time you still love him. It’s like a lovable arrogance. He’s perfect for this city.”

Listen to the latest episode

The Eagles have a solid stash of draft picks (8) and, for a team just one season removed from winning the Super Bowl, a lot of positions that need to be addressed. Several elite members of the offensive line could be on the verge of retirement, while the wide receiver corps appears destined to lose a dynamic member. After bolstering the defense in the early rounds of the draft in recent years, will general manager Howie Roseman pivot this spring? The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Jeff McLane and Devin Jackson combine their reporting and analysis to forecast how the Eagles might attack the 2026 NFL Draft, which gets underway Thursday in Pittsburgh. Listen here.

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