Stephen Curry, the basketball player, is all over television this week — or, to be specific, all over Peacock. There are the Olympic Games, of which you may be aware (and which are being well served by Peacock’s a la carte approach), but there is also “Mr. Throwback,” a new sitcom premiering Thursday, which is likely somewhat lower on your radar, especially if you aren’t Googling “Stephen Curry” this week. I can’t swear he hasn’t been asked a question about it in Paris by some sports reporter, but he seems like too classy a guy to bring it up himself.
Curry stars as a version of himself, though apart from the currency and cachet he brings to the production, the story could be told as well with an entirely fictional athlete. Still, with all respect to Adam Pally, the series’ actual star and a co-creator along with Daniel Libman, David Caspe and Matthew Libman, this would be a harder sell without him. And whether this is a random lark or Curry setting up his post-basketball career, the main takeaway from this six-episode series is that, while he isn’t required to do any dramatic heavy lifting, he’s a charming, genuine presence and there’s a life in pictures waiting if he wants one. Curry wouldn’t be the first athlete to make that transition, but possibly the first you’d cast as the lead in a romantic comedy.
As often happens, preview episodes sent to reporters and critics come with a list of “spoilers,” which are often quite sensible, and even when not, are easy enough to accommodate. “Mr. Throwback” comes with one that is not at all sensible, given that it is essentially the premise of the series, the event that drives most of what comes after. I will tell you that it has something in common with the 1937 Carole Lombard comedy “Nothing Sacred” and its 1954 Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis remake “Living It Up,” and with the 1951 Bob Hope movie “The Lemon Drop Kid.” If you take those ingredients, stir in some childhood trauma, sprinkle on some “Curb Your Enthusiasm” prevarication — Steph is the only completely honest major character — and finish it off with a big scoop of sentiment, you might wind up with something along the lines of “Mr. Throwback.”
Pally plays Danny, who had great promise as a basketball player when he was a kid, but now runs a sports memorabilia store in Chicago notable for such offerings as a bent golf club “used by Tiger Woods’ … wife when she smashed up his Escalade.” For reasons that are not gone into, he owes $90,000 to the Polish mafia, and, given a day to deliver, hits on the idea of putting a touch on his childhood friend Curry, who happens to be in town for a game.
They haven’t seen one another in 25 years. (They were 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 their projects is a situation comedy “Teen Steph,” being written by Phoebe Waller-Bridge — and whose friendship with Danny also ended in middle school.
In approaching Steph, Danny also stumbles into the mockumentary that frames the series, directed by Lucy (Tien Tran) and bankrolled by Curry, for no reason other than “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 in, “People do love a redemption story. But you know what people love even more than a redemption story? A train wreck.”
Danny is a shlub, an immature child-man with a smart ex-wife, Samantha (Ayden Mayeri), and a teenage daughter, Charlie (Layla Scalisi). We are to take him as a good guy deep down, but evidence is slow in coming, notwithstanding Sam saying he is, Charlie’s affection for him and his stated love for her which he also uses as an excuse for bad actions. (“I did it all for Charlie,” he will say. “I’d do anything for my daughter.”) Avoiding the requested (non-) spoiler, I’ll just say he plays a trick, I guess you could call it, on Curry, which gets him enough money to summarily lose the Polish mafia plot line from the series. But the nature of Danny’s deception, which creates sympathy, also revives his friendship with Curry — though Kimberly is less trusting.
Here are some 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 slump: “I low-key started looking into grad school.” Samantha, of a bar successfully turned into a gym: “Turns out most people in Chicago work out drunk, and it’s the same music.” Kimberley: “We weren’t going to misgender a beloved class pet.” There’s a funny bit about Steph being unable to “comprehend failure — literally.” Things just slide off that part of his brain, says his “longevity coach,” Dr. Josh (Rich Sommer), self-described as “one of the foremost thought leaders in the preventative wellness space for six months now,” who has Steph drinking “placentaritas.”
“Mr. Throwback” tries on a lot of different stylistic hats, from absurd to sentimental, from low farce to something like straight 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 certain respects, Letts, the Tony-winning straight actor in the mix, is working in a completely different series.
Pally works hard as Danny, switching between all those stylistic hats. Still, though, we’re meant on some level to feel for him — in a way, say, that we are not meant to feel for Larry David’s characters — he’s so consistently disappointing that one counts the minutes until the series decides it’s time for a change. In the final period, it drives hard toward a happy ending — or endings — which you may find contrived, or moving. Or even both.
