Stephen Curry the basketball player is all over TV this week (or, to be more specific, all over Peacock). There’s the Olympics, which you may be aware of (and which are being well-served by Peacock’s on-demand approach), but there’s also “Mr. Throwback,” a new comedy premiering Thursday, which is probably a little lower on your radar, especially if you’re not Googling “Stephen Curry” this week. I can’t swear some sportswriter hasn’t asked him a question about it in Paris, but he seems like too posh a guy to bring it up himself.
Curry stars as a version of himself, though in addition to the popularity and prestige he brings to the production, the story could also be told with an entirely fictional athlete. Still, with all due respect to Adam Pally, the series’ actual star and co-creator along with Daniel Libman, David Caspe and Matthew Libman, this would be a tougher sell without him. And whether it’s a random joke or Curry gearing up for his post-basketball career, the main takeaway from this six-episode series is that while he’s not required to do any heavy dramatic lifting, he’s a charming, genuine presence and there’s a life in pictures waiting for him if he wants it. Curry wouldn’t be the first athlete to make that transition, but possibly the first one you’d cast as the lead in a rom-com.
As is often the case, preview episodes sent to journalists and critics come with a list of “spoilers,” which are usually pretty sensible, and even when they’re not, they’re pretty easy to include. “Mr. Throwback” comes with one that’s not at all sensible, given that it’s essentially the premise of the series, the event that drives most of what comes next. I’ll tell you that it has something in common with the 1937 Carole Lombard comedy “Nothing Sacred” and its 1954 Dean Martin/Jerry Lewis remake “Living It Up,” and with the 1951 Bob Hope film “The Lemon Drop Kid.” If you take those ingredients, mix in a little childhood trauma, sprinkle in some “Curb Your Enthusiasm” prevarication (Steph is the only completely honest main character) and top it off with a big dollop of sentimentality, you might end up with something akin to “Mr. Throwback.”
Pally plays Danny, who was a great basketball player as a kid but now runs a sports memorabilia store in Chicago notable for offering items like a bent golf club “used by Tiger Woods’ wife when she wrecked his Escalade.” For reasons unexplained, he owes $90,000 to the Polish mob, and when he’s given a day to pay, he gets the idea to cheat on his childhood friend Curry, who’s in town for a game.
Ego Nwodim plays Kimberly, who runs Stephen Curry’s media company, in “Mr. Throwback.”
(Peacock/David Moir/Peacock)
They haven't seen each other in 25 years (they became estranged after an incident, a scandal, also marked by the producers as a spoiler). Also present is their old friend Kimberly (Ego Nwodim), who now runs Steph's media company, Curry Up and Wait (one of her projects is a sitcom, “Teen Steph,” written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge) and whose friendship with Danny also ended in high school.
In getting closer to Steph, Danny also stumbles upon the mockumentary that frames the series, directed by Lucy (Tien Tran) and financed by Curry, for no reason beyond “I do cool stuff all the time,” but which ultimately becomes about Danny. As Kimberly will say at the end of the first episode, describing the series she’s a part of: “People love redemption stories. But you know what people love even more than a redemption story? A train wreck.”
Danny is a slacker, an immature kid with a smart ex-wife, Samantha (Ayden Mayeri), and a teenage daughter, Charlie (Layla Scalisi). Deep down, we're meant to take him for a good guy, but the evidence is slow to come, despite Sam's claims that he is, Charlie's affection for him, and his professed love for her, which he also uses as an excuse for his wrongdoing. (“I did it all for Charlie,” he'll say. “I'd do anything for my daughter.”) To avoid the requested (non)spoiler, I'll just say that he pulls a prank, I guess you could put it that way, on Curry, which gives him enough money to summarily throw off the show's Polish mob plot. But the sympathy-building nature of Danny's deception also rekindles his friendship with Curry, though Kimberly is less trusting.
Also appearing in “Mr. Throwback” are, from left, Ayden Mayeri as Danny’s ex-wife Samantha; and Layla Scalisi as Danny’s daughter Charlie.
(George Burns Jr./Peacock)
Here are a few random lines I enjoyed. Samantha: “I thought it would be a little weird to date a 58-year-old, but he looks great and I don’t mind an early dinner.” Steph, describing a rough patch: “I quietly started looking into grad school.” Samantha, of a bar-turned-successful-gym: “Turns out most people in Chicago work out drunk, and it’s the same music.” Kimberley: “We weren’t going to confuse a beloved class pet.” There’s a funny wrinkle to Steph’s inability to “comprehend failure, literally.” Things just slip out of that part of her brain, says her “longevity coach,” Dr. Josh (Rich Sommer), self-described “one of the foremost thought leaders in the preventative wellness space as of six months ago,” who has Steph drinking “placentarites.”
“Mr. Throwback” tries on a lot of different styles, from the absurd to the sentimental, from farcical to something resembling straight-up drama, especially in Danny’s scenes with his father, Mitch (Tracy Letts), who was also Steph’s childhood coach. Mitch is a man with serious problems, and in some ways, Letts, the Tony-winning straight-laced actor, is working on a completely different show.
Pally works hard as Danny, alternating between all those stylistic roles. Yet we are supposed to empathize with him in some way (in a way, for example, that we are not supposed to empathize with Larry David's characters): he is so consistently disappointing that one counts the minutes until the series decides it is time for a change. In the final period, it moves strongly toward a happy ending (or endings) that can be either contrived or touching. Or even both.
