“The only premise I could ever really give to people for this show is it’s like if Christopher Guest directed ‘Uncut Gems,’” Adam Pally says, previewing his new series “Mr. Throwback.” The mockumentary show does have a similar shape to Josh and Benny Safdie’s modern crime classic: a so-sad, so-fucked-up Jewish businessman takes on life-threatening mob debts and, in a shameless act of survivalist drive, dogs an NBA star and extracts money from him through a bombardment of white lies.
Only in “Mr. Throwback,” Pally’s character, Danny Grossman, is a former basketball prodigy, the “Jewish Jordan” that once went “100 and 100” (100 points, 100 blocks). Stephen Curry was his back-up in middle school. But Danny’s career ended early after his alcoholic father and coach (Tracy Letts) is caught in an elaborate lie. Two decades and a failed marriage later, an in-debt Danny is forced to follow in his old man’s footsteps, heading to San Francisco to make good with Steph and, more importantly, come up with $90,000 to save his life.
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Much like how “Uncut Gems” utilized the unmatched intensity of Kevin Garnett, playing himself, to ratchet up tension, “Mr. Throwback” has its own savvy take on Curry’s persona. Of course, he’s determined in his own right, being a four-time NBA champion and a locker-room leader, but his carefree smile and enduring boyishness suggest a uniquely forgiving temperament — one that Pally’s character pushes to the limits.
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“The show was built around the two of us. It feels good that way,” Pally says.
The series came to be after Pally and his wife, Daniella Liben, appeared on the celebrity game show “About Last Night,” created by Stephen and Ayesha Curry. The celebrity couple series also featured two of Pally’s collaborators from “Happy Endings,” the brilliant-but-canceled show’s creator David Caspe and co-star Casey Wilson.
“The six of us really hit it off. We were going at each other, and doing bits. Sometimes you just click with people,” Pally says. “The next day, we got a call from Stephen and his great producing partner at Unanimous Media, Erick Peyton: ‘If you ever have an idea or anything, bring it to us.’ And we said, ‘Give us literally five minutes.’”
In the end, Pally and Caspe needed two years, but the pair, alongside “Happy Endings” writers Daniel and Matthew Libman, have emerged with a season of television that takes on a more pugnacious tone than their sunny ABC sitcom. David Wain, the director behind anything-goes comedies like “Wet Hot American Summer” and “They Came Together,” helms all six episodes of “Mr. Throwback.” The series fosters an unfussy, absurdist tone that allows Danny’s deceit to snowball to bizarre magnitudes.
“You don’t ever have to tell the truth really. You can just double down until it’s over, until some something else happens, and then it goes away,” Pally says about his character. He adds, “It does reflect what we’re seeing from our leaders in a lot of ways.”
The production also recruited “Saturday Night Live” cast member Ego Nwodim to play Kimberly, once a childhood friend to Steph and Danny, and now the NBA star’s workhorse right-hand-woman. But while Kimberly lives and breathes basketball, Nwodim resigned herself to maintaining a blissful ignorance to the sport while shooting the series.
“I am as stupid about basketball as I was when I started,” she says. “I went to Steph Curry’s shooting practice our last day of shooting, and watching it made my brain break. What is even happening? The man is dribbling two basketballs. There are cones in front of him. Someone’s holding up fingers. … Some people just weren’t meant to be basketball people. I’m one of those people, sadly. But I do like watching it. I still don’t know what’s going on.”
In that instance, Nwodim was tagging along to one of Curry’s workouts preparing him to compete at the Paris Olympics. As “Mr. Throwback” is premiering as Team U.S.A. enters the semfinals, the comedy series seems positioned to draw momentum from Peacock viewers who already had Curry on their TVs over the past two weeks.
But hitting that opportune release window required a speedy production. One conspicuous ad lib of “Hawk Tuah” in the series clues into that timeline; a brand-new viral phrase that would’ve come across as complete nonsense more than two months ago. Nwodim shares that her eight weeks of shooting began as the “SNL” season was hitting its home stretch in May.
“We shot all of Steph’s stuff in a very little bit of time. And it was the last stuff, because he was training for the Olympics and he just had a baby. Their little one came a bit early,” Nwodim says. (Steph and Ayesha Curry welcomed their fourth child, Caius Chai, on May 11.)
As an executive producer, Pally is more guarded about the timeline of the production. But he does voice a guideline about Unanimous Media’s approach to Curry’s availability: “We treat every year as if the Golden State Warriors are going to win the championship. And we schedule a staff around that.” (The last NBA season ended 51 days ago.)
As such, Curry’s appearances in the series are more limited than other characters’. But “Mr. Throwback” is less about basketball than the yes-man entourage economies that grow around it. As Danny draws his ex-wife Samantha (Ayden Mayeri) into his conspiracy, the pair find themselves eager to surrender their principles for the sake of staying in the luxurious orbit of pro sports. And Curry brings a self-effacing folly to his performance as himself: he’s too fixated on his game and too instinctively philanthropic to sniff out the thin lies surrounding him.
“Steph’s character has an obliviousness and naivete to him. They’re living in a different world than Danny,” Nwodim says, discussing a scene where Curry’s circle gathers to sip on a “placenta-rita” — a (fictional!) pregame beverage made with you-guessed-it, harvested from farm animals. “That’s crazy! But it’s not crazy to them because it’s their life now. Danny is such a wild character, but in those moments you get to see him play the straight man and be like, ‘Yeah, that’s fucking weird.’”
“One of the secrets of life is learning how to live without constantly wanting more. I mean, I don’t have that. That’s an incredibly insane thing to feel like you’ve accomplished,” Pally says. “Ask someone who’s flown private for a year to fly commercial. It’s not awesome for them, even if they rode in the back of the plane their entire life before. There’s a lot of humor there. Desperation is funny.”
For Pally, a diehard New York Knicks fan and basketball radio junkie, the opportunity to collaborate with Curry was a delightful opportunity in itself. But he seems most grateful to be working with Caspe again. After “Happy Endings” was abruptly canceled after three seasons, murmurs about a revival have continued to bubble up for nearly a decade now. In May, Casey Wilson even affirmed that “they are trying to make it happen.” And Pally’s got the show on his mind too, having launched a series rewatch podcast with Wilson this summer.
“I am not involved in that process. I obviously would be wherever they wanted me to be. I would love to do more of it,” Pally says. “All I can say is, there’s a lot of corporate hands in it. If you remember, at the end of the show, there were a lot of cards. That means that there’s a lot of people that need to make money off it. And that can be hard.”
“I hope to work with David every year until I die — I love him,” he continues. “I love Casey. I love their family. I think that they love ours. And we just get along on this level. I don’t see a reason why I couldn’t.”
That collaboration could even manifest as more “Mr. Throwback.” Despite Curry’s obligations to the NBA, Pally shares that there’s potential for a return, even taking into account the characters’ swings into outright criminality and tough consequences.
“Steph has an offbeat sense of humor. We wouldn’t be here if he didn’t like what we did,” Pally says. “We’re excited to really push it and see what we can do next. The fact that a viewer can say, ‘Can you even do more after all that?’, that means we can definitely do more.”
All six episodes of “Mr. Throwback” premiere on Peacock on Thursday.
