David Stassen might have been cosmically intended to work on Running Point. The co-showrunner, who produces and writes the basketball comedy with longtime collaborators Ike Barinholtz and Mindy Kaling, explains as much in front of a prominently placed box of Wheaties on his bookcase during a February Zoom. “I’m a huge Chicago basketball fan,” says Stassen, who grew in the city with Barinholtz. “That is the 1991 Bulls — original and unopened.”
The mummified “Breakfast of Champions” adds to Stassen’s cred on Netflix’s instantly renewed Kate Hudson vehicle, though not as much as the string of projects he’s made with his producing partner. After meeting at summer camp and eventually attending high school together — and slight detour for Stassen at ESPN’s Washington D.C. studio — he and Barinholtz got their big break in the writers room for The Mindy Project. They co-wrote Central Intelligence, and Stassen produced Barinholtz in Blockers and then The Oath. And, just a few years back, they even coaxed Mel Brooks to TV for a limited series continuation of his legendary 1981 film History of the World, Part I.
Now, with Running Point, Stassen seems to have something with real legs to it. And, as far as he’s concerned, the team behind the show is ready to make as many episodes as Netflix asks for.
You and Ike have collaborated with Mindy a few times now. Can you diagnose everybody’s weaknesses and strengths in this triad?
Well, lemme tell you about Mindy’s weaknesses. (Laughs.) I’m kidding. I don’t know about weaknesses. We had a lot of time on this before the writer’s room even started. We sat with this more than on The Mindy Project. That was always just hitting the ground running in June and August. Here, we had time to think about the characters and to really talk about how the season was going to go — what happens to everyone, how the basketball season goes. I think our strength is we’re all on the same page in that we love the same comedies and we love the same dramas. We’re always picking from similar inspirations.
You got to shoot in Los Angeles, which really feels like a novelty at this point. What was that conversation like?
It was never up for debate. It’s funny you said it’s a novelty. I said in my speech at the premiere how grateful we were that we shot in L.A. It’s become a privilege more than a right these days. This show has to be made in L.A. The DNA of the show is this privileged famous L.A. family who has access to every club, every restaurant celebrity. We all need to be making more stuff in L.A. I hope things are going that way.
I imagine it also helps with casting. It’s not like you were going to get Kate Hudson up in Vancouver.
You do wonder. Brenda Song has two little boys at home. Would she have gone to Atlanta for four months? You don’t know if you’re going to get everybody. At what point in their life can they pick up and move somewhere else for the show?
Tell me about casting Chet Hanks. With all due respect, but he is kind of the opposite of the internet’s boyfriend. There had to be some reservations.
It was the kind of casting where we had to think on for a bit more. He has a larger than life internet presence. He’s done stuff that’s gotten him attention that was not acting. But, at the end of the day, his audition was the best. I can’t remember if he was pitched or we just got the first submissions of auditions emailed to us. But he felt like he was born to play the role. He was just so invested. He got into basketball, he trained and he promised to be on his best behavior — which we love to hear from anyone.
Hollywood still feels like such a mess right now. What’s your take on the lack of production and how we rebound?
It’s is tough out there. I was just on the showrunners WhatsApp message thread, and it’s really hard to sell something. There’s not a lot of development going on. We’re now almost a year and a half after the strike. And it’s not not a ghost town. You walk on the lots and there’s not as much action as when we were making 24 episodes of The Mindy Project a year. Something is going to click — a Friends or a Big Bang Theory — and then everyone’s going to jump on that.
Do you have a multicam in you?
No, which is funny because Seinfeld is the reason I became a TV writer. I still watch it at 10 o’clock most nights of the week. I have never even written on a multicam, when Cheers, Seinfeld and Friends are the shows I grew up with and really influenced me.
Is there a project that you have taken out and no one will buy that you won’t let go of?
Whenever something doesn’t sell, in my history, it always still has a chance. Ike and I sold Central Intelligence in 2009. They didn’t make it until 2016. We also wrote a comedy pilot called Sweet Peach back then. It was about a proper Civil War general who gets disgraced, demoted and sent off to be the sheriff of a backwards western town in 1870. It was actually the writing sample that Mindy read. We got on The Mindy Project because it was just about outlaws and syphilis, and she had been reading nothing but rom-coms. All that’s to say, someone got a new job at Netflix animation last year and was like, “I want to buy that script.” Something we wrote 15 years ago is now in development at Netflix. So, you never know.
Another Ike collaboration is The Oath, which really looked at how far things might spiral in a Trumpian world. Were it released today, do you think that it would even read as satire?
It feels like it’s 50 to 80 percent more realistic than it did six years ago or whenever it came out. It’s on the doorstep of being a documentary.
This show is built for multiple seasons. Realistically, economically and timing wise, how many episodes do you think you could make if given carte blanche?
If we were given carte blanche, I think we could do 10 to 20 a year.
20?
Sure. We used to do it all the time.
Most people really lost the appetite for it.
Yeah, but we did 26 episodes on season four of Mindy when it was on Hulu. We can obviously do 10. But 10 is easy. Let’s keep going.
Source: Hollywoodreporter
