Tonight is the big night for PBS. Not so much for the NFL.

League of Denial, the Frontline documentary on concussions, is set for 9 p.m. ET. Based on the book by Mark Fainaru-Wada and his brother, Steve Fainaru, the film examines how the NFL looked the other way for a long time before acknowledging that it had a problem.

I did not get an advance screening of the documentary, although I am anticipating it will be excellent.

Here are some reviews, including an interesting assessment from Neil Genzlinger of the New York Times. He appeared uninspired by the documentary.

Much of this has already been reported, with Alan Schwarz of The New York Times often leading the way, but the program will certainly be eye-opening for anyone — especially parents with children of Pop Warner league age — who hasn’t followed the subject closely or seen “The United States of Football,” a documentary released in August.

Eye-opening, but at the same time oddly unsurprising. The N.F.L. is a huge entertainment industry (one with gigantic contracts with ESPN). Tobacco and other big businesses have already shown that when health concerns threaten a business model, a head-in-the-sand approach is often the first line of defense.

Yes, let’s assume not everyone read every word of the NY Times’ reporting on the issue. It will be eye-opening.

Brian Lowery, Variety:

How bad does “League of Denial” look for the NFL? Put it this way: Whenever you are compared with Big Tobacco in the 1960s, your PR department has every reason to be concerned.

Verne Gay, Newsday:

But what “League of Denial” does well is set this up for the average viewer — someone who may not know that for years there has been a raging controversy in the NFL over concussions. “Denial” only hints at the ramifications, but here’s at least one: What if a mom somewhere decides she doesn’t want her son to get chronic traumatic encephalopathy some day? Where, then, will the NFL get its players?

Robert Lloyd, Los Angeles Times:

Television is indicted too, specifically “Monday Night Football,” which, from its premiere in 1970 increased the popularity of the sport and the money it generated. Emphasizing the game’s gladiatorial, human-demolition-derby side, the broadcasts helped change the way the game is played.

We get a lot of slow-motion footage of butting heads, some of it from the NFL’s own home videos, with titles like “Big Blocks and King Size Hits,” “Crash Course” and “Moment of Impact”: “The meek will never inherit this turf,” a narrator intones.

Joanne Ostrow, Denver Post:

Doctors express amazement at what they saw through the microscope, sometimes involving horrible damage to chronologically young brains.

Through each scientific finding, the NFL is shown to have reacted with denials, demanding retractions of scientific papers, discrediting researchers who made the findings public and spending heavily to shut down evidence that football was responsible for the brain damage to players.

Erik Malinowski, Buzzfeed:

Powerful anecdotes put the consequences of brain trauma in human terms. One of the most chilling is told by super-agent Leigh Steinberg, who describes meeting his client, Cowboys quarterback Troy Aikman, in a Dallas-area hospital after the 1994 NFC Championship. Aikman had been knocked from the game with a knee to the head, and Steinberg informed him in the dark — the lights in the hospital were too bright for Aikman’s concussed brain — that he had been concussed but that his team had won the game and that he was heading to his second straight Super Bowl. Five minutes later, Aikman asked him why he was in the hospital and what had happened in the game, and then asked the same thing again five minutes after that, his frontal cortex little more than a skipping vinyl record.