Creative partners Adam Pally and David Caspe didn’t anticipate that the “third in the Pally-Caspe trilogy” would star one of the greatest basketball players of all time.
Pally, a dedicated member of his own rec league basketball team, and Caspe, an “enormous basketball fan and even bigger Stephen Curry fan,” could not believe that the four-time NBA champion wanted to work on a show with them.
“I would not be shocked if we just got a phone call Thursday morning when the show’s supposed to premiere. That’s like, ‘Yeah, Stephen decided not to do it,’” Caspe told TheWrap. “I’d be like, ‘That makes sense. God bless him.’”
The idea for the duo’s mockumentary series “Mr. Throwback” came after an appearance on Ayesha Curry’s HBO Max game show, “About Last Night.”
Caspe and Pally appeared on separate episodes with their wives — “Happy Endings” and “Marry Me” alum Casey Wilson and Daniella Liben, respectively — to play the “Newlywed Game.” After shooting, Pally said that the three couples just hit it off (though Caspe asks that you don’t watch his episode, he’s camera shy).
“We’re joking around backstage and then the next day, [Steph] and his producing partner, this amazingly talented producer, Eric Payton, called us and were like, ‘If there’s any ideas you have, we’d love to hear them,’” Pally recalled to TheWrap.
The producing partners immediately called up their “Happy Endings” writing companions, the Libman Brothers, to tap them for a pitch at Curry’s production company Unanimous Media. From there, the idea to make a mockumentary series about Curry’s middle school teammate scamming him to “save his own ass” was born.
After shooting delays from the writers’ and actors’ strikes last summer, the Peacock series was on a time crunch to get made. Between Curry’s regular NBA season and his appearance at the Paris 2024 Olympics, the star on and off the court was hard to pin down. As a result, the show and its script are extremely current, with references to “Hawk Tuah Girl,” Gypsy Rose and “Saltburn.”
“It honestly wasn’t our intention to be that current. The truth is, we just had such an accelerated production schedule,” writer Daniel Libman told TheWrap. “[It] was such a truncated period of time that I think the result is it seems almost ‘South Park-ian’ in how current it is.”
“We wrapped June 30. This is the fastest any television show has ever gone to air, as far as I can tell,” Caspe added.
Though “Mr. Throwback” is a mockumentary-style series, it does not take notes from Christopher Guest’s canon or “The Office,” rather it is inspired by real life documentaries like “The Last Dance” and Netflix’s Fyre Festival doc. The creators said they wanted the show to answer the question of who made this movie and why. “Mr. Throwback” includes confessionals, music and text slides that mirror that of a straight documentary, as opposed to many of the other spoofs created.
The writing trio of Caspe and the Libman brothers said they were not sure if the show would be improvised or scripted ahead of shooting. They knew that this was Curry’s first foray into acting as a series regular, so they wanted to give him enough material to work with but didn’t know if the athlete had enough time to memorize 60 pages of dialogue.
“Then, of course, because he’s just a genius, he came in, and [director] David Wain called action, and he just knew every one of his lines and knew when to come in and was so funny doing it,” Caspe raved of the athlete.
“Within the first day, we were kind of like, ‘How is he going to take a note?’ And then we almost just forgot that he wasn’t an actor,” Matthew Libman added.
But Curry wasn’t always perfect, the creators noted. Working with Pally and “SNL” star Ego Nwodim, the basketball star was bound to break a couple of times. The creators revealed they even left some of his giggles in the final cut.
“There’s some shots where he’s laughing really hard or where the three of them, Adam, Ego and Stephen, were laughing because they were just having such a good time together,” Caspe said. “That’s just great chemistry.”
Nwodim agreed that the chemistry between the three of them felt like a real friend group. For her first series regular job, she could not have been more excited to work on a project where everyone got to shine and be funny in their own way.
“I didn’t want to miss a beat, and so I think that’s a testament to how much I enjoyed myself that even after I was given permission to go home, I was like, ‘I’m staying,’” Nwodim told TheWrap.
Much of the team for “Mr. Throwback” worked on ABC’s “Happy Endings,” and they said they would love to keep working together on a reboot of that project … if someone can find the money for it.
“Nothing set, but they’re always sort of talking about it,” Caspe confirmed. “I’m all for it, and the cast is all for it. And I actually had a drink with Jonathan Groff, co-showrunner of it, the other day, and he’s all for it. So, you know, we just need someone to pay for it.”
For now, fans of the show can watch the team back in action in “Mr. Throwback.” Pally stars as a down-on-his-luck memorabilia vendor and once-middle school teammate of Stephen Curry, played by himself. When he finds himself in a tricky spot, he reaches out to his old pal for a favor.
Executive producer and lifelong basketball fan said that if nothing else he’s just happy he got to work so closely with the NBA star.
Ultimately, EP and lifelong basketball fan Caspe gushed of Curry, “It was just a dream. We just got to meet him, and that is fine. That’s all I ever wanted from any of this.”
All six episodes of “Mr. Throwback” are available to stream on Peacock.
