Let’s Dance: Showtime moves up docs

"Basketball County: In The Water” is about the home area of Kevin Durant.Twitter/Showtime Sports

The filmmaking industry largely had the lights turned off as COVID-19 lockdowns shuttered productions. But studios and networks with films already nearing the finish line have been able to push forward, and some are even moving up their releases to capture the attention of a sports-starved audience stuck at home. ESPN recently accelerated the launch of “The Last Dance” by two months, and early episodes of the 10-part series have averaged more than 6 million viewers, far and away a record for an ESPN documentary.

Showtime Sports is similarly hoping to take advantage of the current circumstances to offer fans something new to watch. “The longer this goes, the more original content will be at a premium,” said Showtime Sports President Stephen Espinoza. “Sports fans in particular are probably the hungriest. We haven’t seen too much interruption of scripted series yet, or non-sports programming, but live sports has dried up virtually completely. I think anything sports-related that is fresh right now is going to be very attractive to the sports fan who is desperate for sports to come back.”

Espinozagetty images

Showtime typically releases five or six sports docs throughout each year, but the network now has plans to roll out much of its 2020 inventory on a monthly schedule. “We were very fortunate in that the five or six documentaries we have in the can, most of them … were far enough along in the post-production process that they were not interrupted by the shutdown,” Espinoza said. “We want to be wise and prudent in terms of saving our stuff for parts of the year where we might not have access to original content, but at the same time we also want to strike while the iron is hot.”

First up is “Basketball County: In The Water,” which will debut on May 15. Produced by Kevin Durant’s Thirty Five Media, the film will dig into the historical and cultural elements that have turned Maryland’s Prince George’s County into a basketball hotbed. Durant, who grew up in Prince George’s County, shopped the project around last summer, and Espinoza feels Showtime was able to land the movie due to the network’s recent success with basketball projects that look beyond the court, like “Shut Up and Dribble” and “Iverson.” “I think [Durant] took away from those projects that we had an affinity for the sport,” Espinoza said. “Not just sports docs, but meaningful films that have legs beyond the sports audience.”

DurantTwitter/Showtime Sports

Following a month later is “Ringside,” which Espinoza describes as the “Hoop Dreams” of boxing. It debuted on the festival circuit in 2019 and won silver in the Chicago Film Festival’s documentary category. The film follows two amateur boxers from Chicago’s South Side across an eight-year journey. Showtime will announce Monday that it’s picked up the movie, which is scheduled to air on the network on June 12.

The high point of Showtime’s summer schedule is the previously announced “Outcry,” a long-form investigation into the details of, circumstances around and fallout from a Texas high school football player being convicted of sexually assaulting a child. The highly anticipated film was originally slated for a South By Southwest debut before the March event was canceled. The first episode will air on July 5, a Sunday night release typically reserved for the network’s premier programming. The five-part series will be the longest sports doc Showtime has yet released.

And then in August, Showtime will debut the unannounced “Bad Hombres” ahead of an originally planned release later in the year. “As soon as we went into lockdown, we reached out to the filmmakers and said, ‘OK, you told us September, is there a chance you can get it in as early as July or August for delivery?’” Espinoza said. “We sort of leaned on the producers and said, ‘This is something, the sooner the better.’” The film centers on the Tecolotes de los Dos Laredos (Owls of the Two Laredos), an unaffiliated Class AAA baseball team that splits its home games between stadiums in Texas and Mexico. “With many of our documentaries, we try to use sports as a lens to examine societal topics, or political or cultural issues,” Espinoza said. “‘Bad Hombres’ is a way to use baseball to look in a very practical manner at immigration issues and nationality issues.”

The slate of new movies can carry sports fans through the summer, but Showtime’s flow of original content may dry up soon after as the network contends with the major hurdle slowing the rest of the industry: ongoing lockdowns preventing filmmakers from starting or continuing production on upcoming sports projects. One such film is Showtime’s “The Big Ticket,” which is about the career of Kevin Garnett and had just started shooting in February. The doc was originally slated for fall 2020, but Espinoza expects the film will likely be delayed until later in the year or early 2021.