Blake Griffin Steps Behind the Desk: Former NBA Star Lands Late-Night Sports Show on Prime Video
Blake Griffin is trading the hardwood for a late-night desk. The six-time NBA All-Star, 37, will host a weekly sports commentary show called The Stepback with Blake Griffin, arriving on Prime Video and YouTube from 20 October — timed to the start of the NBA season, with new episodes dropping every Tuesday after that. The Hollywood Reporter
The format is built around Griffin alone. He sits behind a desk, chronicling and opining on the week in sports. There will generally be no guests. The commentary is his. Griffin has said he takes cues from The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight — shows that use a single host's voice to dig into a topic, rather than the traditional couch-and-chat of late night.
The topics Griffin plans to tackle go well beyond scores and highlights. The show's slate includes sports gambling, NIL (name, image and likeness deals for college athletes), taxpayer-funded stadiums, pot use, analytics, and the state of sports journalism itself. It is a roster of subjects that sit at the intersection of sport, money and culture — the kind of territory that sports talk radio covers loudly and late-night television rarely touches at all.
All live-studio episodes have already been recorded and are now in post-production. That means the first season is in the can before a single episode airs — a straight-to-series approach, meaning no pilot was shot to test the concept first. Amazon's Wondery division, known for sports podcasts including New Heights with Jason & Travis Kelce and The Lead, is producing alongside Griffin.
Griffin is not new to being on camera off the court. He appeared on Amazon's NBA on Prime studio show, acted in Broad City and The Female Brain, and hosted a hidden-camera series on TruTV. Behind the scenes, his production banner Mortal Media — formed with former NFL offensive lineman Ryan Kalil — has produced Hulu's White Men Can't Jump reboot and Apple TV+'s Hello Tomorrow!. Mortal Media also debuted the docuseries We Are Osos, about a Mexican American football club in Monterrey co-owned by Griffin, Kalil, San Francisco 49ers tight end George Kittle and others.
What makes The Stepback worth watching is the gap it aims to fill. Late-night television has politics, pop culture and celebrity interviews well covered. Sports opinion, at length and from a single voice, has largely been the domain of podcasts and cable shout-fests. A former player with production experience and a clear list of targets, backed by Amazon's infrastructure, is a different proposition. Whether audiences follow Griffin from the highlight reel to the desk will depend on the one thing the format demands above all: a point of view sharp enough to make a viewer tune in on purpose.
