Turns out I've been looking for the next The Last Dance in all the wrong places. I was sure it was going to be the Lionel Messi World Cup documentary on Apple, but nope. Somehow, they made the most entertaining final ever boring as hell, with the best footballer in history recounting the achievement of his dream like he's telling a mechanic about a rattling noise in his car. A couple of years ago, Beckham got a little closer with the help of some killer talking heads, but it failed as a character study. The Last Dance was great because it interrogated Michael Jordan's almost sociopathic need to dominate his competitors. It was about an all-time great athlete's fascinating psychology. With Beckham, that depth just wasn't there.

But now I've finally found a show I'm convinced can sit alongside The Last Dance in the pantheon of great sports docuseries: HBO's 100-Foot Wave (which airs on Sky and Now). It's about big wave surfing, the most beautiful, deranged sport on earth. In it, we follow a community of seemingly normal people (with poorly functioning amygdalas) who want to ride the biggest wave ever ridden and not die trying. At the centre of it all is Garrett McNamara, a 58-year-old surfing pioneer who has endured several life-threatening wipeouts and over 100 concussions but is still not done.

He and his peers make a living travelling around the world chasing swells which stir up waves the size of office blocks, though they spend much of the winter in the small fishing village of Nazaré in Portugal, home of the biggest waves in the world. Unlike in regular surfing, they have to pair up and tow each other onto said waves via jet ski, because they're too big and powerful to paddle. Because of this, the surfers form a community that is like a dysfunctional family, but one where everyone has to put their lives in each other's hands (some of the surfers function as safety drivers who have to act quickly and collect people after wipeouts; this has ended badly on many occasions).

Like Jordan, McNamara is a flawed, chewy character. At times, he's egotistical, grumpy, tunnel-visioned on his own success. Then he'll be sweet and loving to the people around him, helping them achieve their batshit goals. His older peers clearly find him controlling and annoying, while the younger ones are too in awe of him to criticise him on camera. In season three - which dropped earlier this year - we watch McNamara grapple with the looming end of his career. After yet another head trauma, a doctor urges him to think about giving it up as any more might give him permanent brain damage. His long-suffering and exhausted wife, Nicole (mother to his three youngest children), who had until this point accepted his madness, now wants him to chill out and stay alive. Still, McNamara feels he has unfinished business with the sea. You get the sense that he just can't let go of the possibility of being a world record holder (as he was in 2012, with a 78-footer) again. Or maybe he just wants to feel the high of a monster barrel one more time.

The other characters are more straightforwardly likeable, like Devon's Andrew Cotton and French trailblazer Justine Dupont, so it's tough to watch when they injure themselves severely, which they all inevitably do. In one particularly gnarly fall, McNamara's upper arm is shattered, leaving him in such agony that he asks his wife to suffocate him to make it stop. In season three, we see a surfer die after a wipeout at Nazaré. McNamara talks about it like an inevitability. And yet these guys, when they fall and break something, get back up, however many months of rehabilitation later, and schlep back out to the lineup.

Why do they do it? Even they don't know. It's either about connecting with Mother Nature, or a rush that no drug can replicate, or being the best and ballsiest of them all. But it's partly because, for better or worse, they've got the community around them - most of whom have been through the same thing - coaxing them back out. They treat PTSD like it's something to be ignored and overcome, rather than a sign that they might have got away with something in the first place. They are undoubtedly the most fascinating athletes in the world.

That most recent set of episodes is definitely the show's narrative peak, and I'd recommend diving straight in there; if you like it, you'll want to go back over seasons one and two anyway. In the shortest pitch possible: 100-Foot Wave is like the most aesthetically pleasing and genuinely high-stakes reality show you'll ever see.

GQ stories you may have missed:

Anthony Boyle is House of Guinness' secret weapon

The untold stories behind your favourite TV memes

I can't stop thinking about Sean Penn's walk in One Battle After Another