Mere months after waxing the court for Steph Curry and Mr. Throwback, Peacock is taking another free throw. Deadline announced today that Peacock would continue sending up the highly competitive world of pro ball just as The A.V. Club ran out of basketball terms. The W, a WNBA-based scripted comedy from two-time WNBA All-Star Chiney Ogwumike and GLOW creators Carly Mensch and Liz Flahive, will join the growing lineup of basketball-based comedies, including Throwback and Netflix’s Running Point. Sadly, Winning Time remains canceled.
Based in part on the careers of Ogwumike and her agent, Allison Galer, The W will follow a hot-shot rookie through the cutthroat world of pro sports. The scripted series will be a half-hour long, which means it’s a comedy, and explore the “glamour and grind” of women’s sports, which doesn’t sound funny, but we’ll reserve judgment for the finished product and not a second earlier.
The W continues television’s five-year project to find a basketball TV show that lasts longer than NBC’s Hang Time. Over the past five years, basketball shows have become a staple of the television landscape, presumably with increased interest in the NBA and WNBA. However, networks and streamers have yet to find a slam dunk (hey, we remembered another basketball term). Over the past five years, we’ve seen quite a few air balls (swish), whether it be Disney+’s Big Shot, AppleTV+’s Swagger, and Clipped, a miniseries that clearly ripped-off the ad campaign for the Taraji P. Henson vehicle What Men Want, but we digress. Maybe the problem with basketball shows is similar to Herbie Hancock’s theory of music: “If all you see are dudes in the audience, that means your music is dead.”
