Peacock’s Mr. Throwback Dunks On Impossible Odds to Deliver Comedy Gold

Adam Pally, Ego Nwodim, Ayden Mayeri, and Erick Peyton talk fast-tracking a Steph Curry comedy into a bona fide mockumentary hit.

By Casey Epstein-Gross  |  August 14, 2024 | 10:15am
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In Mr. Throwback, Kimberly Gregg, a fictionalized version of Stephen Curry’s COO Tiffany Williams (played by Ego Nwodim), puts together an all-time-best birthday party for a dying 12-year-old in 24 hours. That feat might seem impressive to us low-life normal citizens, but within the “Stephiverse” (as Kimberly once calls the metaphorical solar system revolving around Curry’s sun), that is, quite literally, child’s play. Perhaps that explains the behind-the-scenes lore of the show itself: as writer David Caspe (Happy Endings, Champaign ILL) said of Mr. Throwback to Variety earlier this week, “I think it’s the fastest that any television show has been made.” Why the rush? Oh, only so the series, which features Curry’s first ever foray into scripted television, would line up with another first for Curry: his first ever Olympics. The fact that the show made it out in time is astonishing in itself—but Curry wasn’t done, and casually scored 36 points (?!) in Team USA’s first match, which not only rocketed the US to a last minute underdog win, but perfectly advertised his own Mr. Throwback, which debuted that same day. It’s any PR company’s wet dream. 

Such a confluence of events should’ve been virtually impossible, for myriad reasons. But that’s what Stephen Curry does best, both in fiction and in reality: the impossible. As actor Adam Pally, who stars alongside Curry in Mr. Throwback, tells Paste of the series: “Art imitates life, you know?” 

With a writing crew led by Caspe alongside Matthew and Daniel Libman, direction from Wet Hot American Summer’s David Wain, and an ensemble cast made up of Pally (a frequent collaborator of Caspe and the Libman brothers, who starred in both Happy Endings and Champaign ILL), SNL’s Ego Nwodim, and I Love That For You actress Ayden Mayeri, Mr. Throwback’s roster is deep. Rounding out the crew is Stephen Curry—who plays himself—and executive producer Erick Peyton, the CEO of Curry’s company Unanimous Media, which produced the show. 

It’s perhaps an unexpected collaboration, but it’s an organic one: Caspe and Pally (and their respective wives) participated in Stephen and Ayesha Curry’s game show About Last Night in 2022, and the three couples simply hit it off. Soon after, Peyton pitched a potential collaboration on Curry’s behalf, and Pally and Caspe enlisted the Libman brothers to help create the series that eventually became Mr. Throwback. This is not the first rodeo that Pally, Caspe, and the Libman brothers have attended together; as Pally puts it, working on Mr. Throwback was like “getting the band back together.” The four were immensely excited to work on a project again, and that energy propelled the entire series. “I think we really knew how important the time together would be, and that it doesn’t come around that often, so we put it all out there,” Pally says, “And I think you can feel that in every frame—how excited everyone was to be there for every little part of it.”

In fact, it was this genuine connection and understanding shared by the team that actually convinced Unanimous Media to sign on for Stephen Curry’s first-ever acting role: “When we chatted with the Libmans and Caspe and Pally,” Peyton explains, “there was this connectivity between all of them, which, for [Stephen and Unanimous Media], is one of the most important things, and kind of the hardest box to check.” 

Their enthusiasm was infectious, permeating the entire set. “I had illegal amounts of fun shooting this show,” Nwodim tells Paste. “Like, truly, it should not be legal how much fun I had with that entire cast.” I can only imagine—the series is already fun to watch, and you can tell that everyone involved sincerely loved working on it.

The plot is relatively straightforward: Mr. Throwback is a mockumentary-style series following Pally’s Danny Grossman as he reconnects with (read: scams) his childhood friends, Stephen and Kimberly. Danny used to outshine even Stephen on the middle school basketball court, but after a shocking betrayal (of a sort), he ended up ostracized from both the sport and his closest friends. As the years passed, Steph grew into the Stephen Curry (with the help of Kimberly, who runs Steph’s entire life, a task about as simple as running an international multimedia conglomerate). Danny, however, found himself living the modest life of a sports memorabilia dealer, frequently strapped for cash and unable to support his daughter Charlie (Layla Scalisi) and his ex-wife Sam (the scene-stealing Ayden Mayeri), let alone pay back the Polish mafia (it’s a long story). He turns to Stephen and Kimberly for help—and may or may not panic and tell them his 12-year-old is not long for this world, stricken as she tragically is by some incurable disease. Steph, in his magnanimity, declares the three old friends will throw a charity game for Charlie in the hopes of raising money to discern what illness she’s even afflicted with (as Danny asserts, it’s so bad that doctors don’t even know). From there, it’s only natural for hijinks and scams galore to follow. 

While it may feel like we’re past the true heyday of the 2010s’ mockumentary era, Mr. Throwback finds a way to be both nostalgic and fresh in its execution. “We were definitely playing with that genre, and tried to comment on it a bit,” Pally says of the choice to utilize this format for the series, “I grew up on the Christopher Guest movies, The Office and all that stuff. I love it.” Considering the excess of athlete documentaries that have proliferated in the past few decades, making Mr. Throwback a mockumentary just felt organic, and also allowed Pally, Caspe, and the Libmans further room for commentary. “In some of the shows from that era, you often wonder, like, who’s filming and why,” Pally says, no doubt alluding to, for instance, the never-explored in-world justification for why, exactly, The Office’s camera crew filmed the goings-on of a Scranton, PA paper sales business for 10 years and change. “We wanted to explore that in the sense of a comedy.” 

It was the first time acting in a long-form mockumentary project for both Mayeri and Nwodim, and Mayeri describes it as utterly freeing. “Coming from comedy, I always try to make everything as funny as possible, but with something like this, where it needs to feel like a documentary, it’s not about getting the funny joke,” Mayeri says. “It’s about really making it feel like I’m a real person.” That authenticity feels, perhaps, even easier to achieve in a mockumentary project, in large part because of the absence of formal lighting, formal shots; instead, there are just “cameras floating everywhere, [capturing] things happening.” Fittingly, Nwodim describes the experience on set as “pretty chaotic but, like, good chaos,” which could also double as a description for the series itself.

When speaking with the cast during a junket, both Nwodim and Mayeri agree that the “laugh out loud” nature of the script was what drew them to the project. “I was hooked by the pilot,” Nwodim says, recalling her first time looking over the script, cackling to herself in a Brooklyn bar. “Usually it’s hard to laugh out loud from just a script, but it was so well written and so funny,” Mayeri agrees. The show often feels like a 2024 basketball-focused version of The Lonely Island’s 2016 comedic masterpiece Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping, a similarly parodic mockumentary-style send-up of celebrity culture (albeit centered around music instead of sports). The series is nothing groundbreaking, of course, but watching it (particularly the first few episodes) was one of the most light and fun viewing experiences I’ve had this summer, which caught me completely off-guard. From the cameos to the disarmingly current references—there’s a “Hawk Tuah” joke in there that genuinely made my jaw drop, especially given how recently that meme entered the cultural zeitgeist—Mr. Throwback has an impressive joke-to-minute ratio, chock full of one-liners and off-the-cuff jabs. 

With so much of the cast and crew coming from a comedic background, it was only natural that the environment was one of collaboration and improvisation. “Everyone was operating at the top of their intelligence, as we like to say in improv,” Nwodim relays, “We were all providing alts to current lines, buttoning lines in ways we thought would serve the script. Everyone was just so fast and able to play off each other.” When I asked Pally about a personal favorite line (Tien Tran, who plays the director of the in-world documentary, says in a deadpan that her NYU senior project was a film on “free-bleeding nuns”—as someone who attended a liberal arts college, I think I have about five peers who made that same film), he laughs and says that Tran “must have improvised 15 hilarious documentary names,” then cheekily suggests making posters for all of them as merch (I am not ashamed to say I would buy one).

But even so, Mr. Throwback is more than just jokes: it has a surprisingly earnest beating heart. The emotional core of the show is rooted in the genuine chemistry between its leads, from the trio of basketball-loving childhood buddies to Pally and Mayeri’s (ex-)relationship. “When we were shooting our scenes between Danny, Stephen, and Kimberly, it was really like three old friends,” Nwodim says, grinning, “I think that’s part of why the show feels so grounded, even when there’s this heightened, crazy thing going on.” Mayeri felt the same with Pally; the pair hit it off the moment they met at the chemistry read. “It was immediate,” she recalls, “It was a real ‘when you know, you know’ situation. It just felt right.”

Originally, when Mayeri first heard she was being considered for the role of the ex-wife, she blanched at the notion; “I was like, ‘Oh no, here we go. It’s all just going to be like, Danny! Don’t do that!’” But upon learning more about the character, Mayeri was extremely pleased to find that Sam was far from a wet blanket: “She’s a rascal, too!” Sam is more than “just a TV wife,” more than Mr. Throwback’s rendition of Breaking Bad’s Skyler White; she’s “specific and recognizable,” a mom working at OrangeTheory whose petty (yet very earned) frustration with other PTA moms—seriously, what kind of mother holds their middle schooler’s birthday party at freaking Tao to one-up a classmate’s get-together?!—pushes her down an unexpected road. 

Nwodim’s character, Kimberly, is a similarly elevated rendition of an archetypal female character: the hard-ass. Kim runs Steph’s entire empire, a job very few people could do—”I can barely manage my own life,” Nwodim laughs, “Managing someone else’s entire life and career on top of that? Godspeed.” But Kimberly is not just a hypercompetent automaton; there are many cracks of humanity that peek through, and that makes all the difference. “It was so much fun to portray this, like, badass woman who has it all together—in the male-dominated sports world, no less—and is holding her own, but also then getting to showcase moments where you get to see her softness that she’s, perhaps, not wearing on the surface,” Nwodim says, comparing it to her own experience as a woman in comedy. “She’s this badass, hard-ass woman, but she’s also still just a human, right? If you’re paying attention, you see that, and that’s really important.” 

The surprising emotional cache of the series is what made the project stand out so much to Peyton, who gravitated towards the authenticity and humanity of the script: “We wanted a good balance of gently poking fun [at the basketball world and even Steph himself], but not necessarily going too hard at people or at a situation. […] The goal is to have this mixture of funny and heart, aspirational and inspirational, even with all the jokes.” As such, Peyton hopes that the series “can inspire people to connect to past friends and give people second chances,” which are “all the themes [Steph and I] look for in a show.”

“Inspirational” might seem a strange word choice considering Mr. Throwback is about such morally ambiguous characters (namely Danny and, to a lesser extent Sam, both of whom fall backwards into the scam of a lifetime), but at its heart, the series really is about second chances. It’s a testament to the fact that human beings can change for the better, so long as they do the work necessary to grow. 

Danny is not just a ‘bad dude,’ so to speak; according to Pally, he’s a man who “is just constantly making the wrong choice, and you got to feel bad for someone like that.” Pally explains that evoking that empathy for someone stuck on that ‘bad choice road’ (a la Better Call Saul) was crucial for the series. The writers hoped to emphasize that it’s not always as black and white as it may seem: “For people like [Danny], it might not always be entirely their fault,” Pally says. “Maybe they were taught to make the wrong choice, and it’s a cycle that they can’t break.” That certainly holds true for Pally’s character, whose father set him down this path a long time ago, and for much of the show, it seems unlikely that Danny will find it in himself to turn over a new leaf. But, like with Kimberly and Sam, Mr. Throwback does indeed put a bit of a more hopeful spin on the archetypal once-great, now-washed-up scumbag with a heart of gold (or, at least, like, bronze)—Danny isn’t doomed, not necessarily. There are choices he can make to turn his life around. He just has to make them.

That mindset—of making the hard choice—is at the crux of not only the series, but of the Stephen Curry phenomenon, at least according to Adam Pally. “I think the thing we take for granted, is that it’s not automatic,” Pally says. “[Steph] has to make that choice, and that’s why he’s better than everybody, and that’s why he’s the best shooter of all time. That’s why he’s Stephen Curry—because he makes that choice to do all that work every single day. That’s the difference.”

This holds true for both the fictionalized Curry of Mr. Throwback and the real-life star himself; even in the midst of shooting, the grind never stops, not once. He grinds to be the greatest shooter of all time, and he grinds to meet the high standards of the professional actors on the Mr. Throwback set. Peyton admits that he wasn’t sure how Steph would do with scripted television—”You don’t know until you’re there, I would be lying if I said otherwise”—but all his fears dissipated when the man himself showed up to his first shoot “completely off-book. He knew his lines, he even knew everybody else’s lines.” As time went on, he grew more comfortable on set and started to play around like his co-stars, despite lacking their background in comedy; he began “to try things, to try to be funny, to try to be emotional.” And eventually, it paid off: he was surprisingly good, always affable and rarely stilted. Considering how egregious many celebrities’ first dips into film often are, Mr. Throwback is a genuinely rare specimen.

It’s not as if Curry’s game could simply take a break for Mr. Throwback either, not with the Olympics looming just weeks ahead. Many of his days shooting television were double-booked as days shooting hoops. Nwodim went to one of his practices towards the end of filming and suddenly understood everything: “I was like, ‘Oh. I get it. I understand how you’re the greatest shooter of all time, it all makes sense.’ It was such a remarkable experience to get to witness it, this balance he has between constant frenetic motion and an inner sense of calm.” (Nwodim is currently on a mission to discover what, if anything, Stephen can’t do—”I bet he can’t braid hair. That’s what I’m guessing. I’ll see if he can braid hair,” she says.) Pally describes working alongside Curry as utterly singular, “a dream come true,” He continues, “The best way I could phrase it is that Stephen operates at a really high frequency. Everything is enhanced when you’re around someone like that; you kind of raise your frequency to match theirs. It was great. I hope to do it every year.”

And perhaps Pally will get to: “We talk a lot about Season 2, and what that would look like, and how the show could grow to Seasons 3 and 4 and 5,” Pally says. “In a show like this, there’s endless possibilities.” When asked if Stephen might try his hand on the small (or big!) screen again, Peyton demurs, saying only “time will tell,” but admitting that, at the very least, the basketball pro “really, really enjoyed this.” But, given the final line of the season—which seemed to explicitly set up a sequel—and the cast’s collective fantasizing about future iterations of Mr. Throwback, (Mayeri teased some “really fun stuff” planned for Season 2), the odds seem pretty good. That is, of course, if Peacock allows them one, as Mayeri points out. Ball’s in your court, Peacock; you know what to do.

Mr. Throwback is now streaming on Peacock. 

Casey Epstein-Gross is a New York based writer and critic whose work can be read in Paste, Observer, The A.V. Club, Jezebel, and other publications. She can typically be found subjecting innocent bystanders to rambling, long-winded monologues about television, film, music, politics, or any one of her strongly held opinions on bizarrely irrelevant topics. Follow her on Twitter or email her at [email protected].

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