When Kobe Bryant returned to Philadelphia for his final game, one of the reporters at his press conference was Evan Monsky, Bryant’s former high school basketball teammate at Lower Merion. During the Q&A, Monsky asked Bryant to name the best point guard he ever played with and Bryant, without skipping a beat, saluted “Evan Monsky” as the best passer, before listing the Hall of Famers and All-Stars from his various NBA teams.
It was a good moment because it captured something extremely satisfying in dramatic terms: Every NBA superstar — every superstar in any sport — at some point in their life shared a roster with somebody who did not, in fact, become a superstar themselves. Somebody who may not have played college or even high school ball. That person went on to live a normal life filled with normal highs and lows and probably multiple times every year, that person would hear mention of the superstar and find themselves unable to resist saying, “Yo, when we were 12, we were on the same team and I was better.”
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Mr. Throwback
“Fame” is a good platform for storytelling, but “fame adjacency” may be ever better, since it combines dreams both realized and unfulfilled.
I can’t say for sure if the Bryant/Monsky viral moment was a direct inspiration for Peacock‘s new comedy Mr. Throwback, but I’m assuming it was. Featuring Steph Curry, playing himself, as the superstar and Adam Pally, not playing himself, as the premature has-been, Mr. Throwback has some of the same energy and relatable virtues, stretched a little thin over six half-hour episodes.
The mockumentary has a fatal flaw that at least starts from an admirable place. Creators Pally, David Caspe, Matthew Libman and Daniel Libman decided they wanted the series to have some real emotional stakes, to go beyond the easy laughs of the dream fulfilled/denied trappings and make a show about generational cycles of addiction and trauma. It’s not, in any way, a bad aspiration, but Mr. Throwback ends up with the wrong percentage of taking-itself-seriously.
A better version of the show would be either 25 percent less serious, allowing for the opportunity to refine a sense of humor too frequently driven by poorly executed references, or else 25 percent more serious, actually taking the time to honor its melancholic undercurrent, rather than making it fight glib punchlines for airtime.
I liked elements of Mr. Throwback and, it must be said, Steph Curry is pretty good. But the material does not come together as a good show.
Pally plays Danny Grossman, a Charlotte-area middle school basketball phenom who went from being hyped as the “Jewish Jordan” — Tamir Goodman goes unacknowledged — to a national punchline when it was revealed that his dominance stemmed from playing with kids two years younger than he was. As a result of the scandal, Danny became estranged from his father/coach Mitch (Tracy Letts) and ostracized by his former backup Steph Curry and their former best friend Kimberly (Ego Nwodim).
Twenty-five years later, Steph Curry is Steph Curry, NBA legend and “Hall of Fame sweetie boy,” and Kim is the CEO of Steph’s very prolific brand/production company, Curry Up and Wait (not to be confused with Curry’s actual Unanimous Media banner).
Danny, meanwhile, runs an unsuccessful memorabilia store, which as another character explicitly notes, points to his desire to live in the past. And why wouldn’t he want that? In the present, Danny is pining for his ex-wife Samantha (Ayden Mayeri), trying to hold onto his relationship with his tween daughter Charlie (Layla Scalisi) and he’s $90,000 in debt to the Polish mob.
It’s that debt that leads Danny to contrive a reunion with Steph and Kim, orchestrating a farce in which Steph comes to believe that Charlie has a terminal disease and Danny comes to be a part of Steph Curry’s bubble of stardom.
That debt is also where Mr. Throwback‘s tonal struggles originate. If you want me to believe that a 12-year-old kid had his picture on a Wheaties box and was the focus of national media attention for his basketball prowess, I’ll embrace the broadness and ephemeral nature of that joke. It doesn’t need explaining further.
But if you’re making a series that’s somewhat about the consequences of addiction, you can’t have a 30-something man be in life-endangering debt to organized crime in the first 10 minutes of your series and then basically never mention it, or the circumstances around it, again after the first episode. At that point, you’re saying, “We want the show to have stakes, but not those stakes,” so why bother?
Pally doesn’t quite know either. Danny is such a broad caricature for much of the series that it would take tremendous performance tact to make him fleetingly believable as a tragic figure, and Pally just can’t land both extremes. This is made all the more evident by how great Letts is at grounding his own similarly bifurcated character. Letts has silly scenes as part of a sobriety-promoting improv group and he has sad scenes as a man desperately clinging to any hope of redemption, but he feels like a real person. Danny does not.
It’s possible that Pally just enjoys the challenge. The Happy Endings star’s last series, as you may be forgetting, was the Sonic the Hedgehog spinoff Knuckles, an oddly similar and oddly funnier series also featuring Pally as a former aspiring athlete dogged by daddy issues and sharing scenes with an inanimate object.
That, of course, isn’t fair to Knuckles (the red CG character) nor to Steph Curry, whose approach to playing himself is almost completely without rough edges. He’s very willing to laugh at the privilege of being an NBA nepo-baby. But otherwise this is a job-interview assortment of biggest flaws, including “I work too hard and I’m too generous for my friends,” with amiable if predictable hijinks ensuing from there. The show puts him in some funny circumstances and he comes across as a good sport with genuinely good comic timing, entering an NBA pantheon in which he absolutely tops Michael Jordan and Lebron James.
Nwodim, who has had a long run as perhaps the most underrated Saturday Night Live castmember, has much better rapport with Curry than Pally does. When the writing for her character is sharp — a monologue explaining “Stephenomics” is probably my favorite part of the entire series — she’s excellent. Too often, the writing for her character isn’t that sharp — a runner about Michael B. Jordan is especially flimsy — but that’s true throughout.
The series leans too much into forgettable jokes about its mockumentary format, very surface-deep basketball references — I did laugh each time guest star Steve Kerr delivered his recurring punchlines — and even more desperate attempts at currency. Like, kudos, I suppose, to Mr. Throwback for making the first Hawk Tuah Girl reference I’ve seen in a scripted series, but talk about a recipe for instant obsolescence.
To its semi-credit, Mr. Throwback may lard up on instantly stale jokes, but it goes easy on instantly stale cameos. The few basketball cameos mostly add to the reality of NBA studio show scenes, while the “as themselves” appearances are more appealingly odd, like pasta impresario Evan Funk. Extended “guest” turns like Letts and Rich Sommer as Dr. Josh — “I’ve been one of the foremost thought leaders in the preventative wellness space for over six months now” — are more successful.
The series generally fizzles as it attempts to resolve the core farce — one person after another learns the truth individually and it loses all tension or humor — and then sets itself up, in the finale, for a second season that doesn’t feel at all necessary. Maybe if the first season had been closer to “excellent” instead of only occasionally “excellent adjacent.”
