Like many in sports media, Bomani Jones had a transitional 2023 after seeing his HBO show Game Theory canceled by Warner Bros. Discovery and leaving ESPN.
Since those moves, Jones brought his popular podcast The Right Time to Wave Sports and Entertainment and has teased more writing, including a potential book.
Jones recently joined The Ringer NBA Show’s Real Ones podcast with Logan Murdock to discuss what he learned during two seasons making Game Theory and why he doesn’t regret the experience despite the show getting canceled.
“For me, it did go as planned within the limits of what I could plan,” Jones explained. “They gave me a season, six episodes. My plan was to do the best six episodes that I could. I did the best six episodes that I could. I feel like we accomplished that plan. Then from there they gave us another season with ten episodes. And I had a clear picture of what I wanted to do with those ten episodes. I never planned on season three.”
More from Jones:
“For me, this was always, ‘I can’t believe I’m here.’ I never, ever stopped being present in the moment of doing that show. So yes I would have liked to have done that show for 10 years. I don’t know if I would have been capable of doing that show for 10 years, but I would have loved to have been able to be the person to say, ‘you know what, we’re doing with doing this now,’ rather than the network making the call.
“But as I look at it, and I say this because I think it’s something a lot of people could stand to here, I do think it went as planned on my end. And I view it unequivocally as being successful for me. A, I don’t work for Warner Bros., I don’t know what success is for them. … Them deciding not to bring that show back, if you look at all the other things that they brought back, it’s hard to take it personally. I can’t go look at that and be like, if I had done this, this, this and this differently, they would have kept the show. I have no idea.”
Jones is efforting to keep a level head within a transforming industry. In fairness to him, Game Theory also premiered amid the launch and rapid evolution of the Max streaming service. The show, especially in its first season, was designed to incorporate man-on-the-street segments and audience reaction — but debuted during a pandemic.
And even so, lasting two seasons at WBD these days is nothing to turn up one’s nose at.
“I can’t say that I was a victim, because I was a winner,” Jones added. “Because I got to do this in the first place. For two years, I could legitimately say that my professional peers were John Oliver, Bill Maher, Trevor Noah, up and down the list. And I firmly believe that not only were they my peers, if you looked at the product I put together, I wasn’t as good as those dudes but I wasn’t in a, ‘you got no business being here’ sort of situation.”
Game Theory was truly unique. Mixing informative segments like NFL focus groups with a mock Duke basketball museum exhibit walkthrough made the show stand out.
Jones did have one regret though: veering too far from the sports world with the show’s staffing.
“I did not make enough of a requirement for writing on the show to be a sports nerd,” Jones told Murdock. “We were really trying to get people as broad as we possibly could, and we didn’t have enough sports nerditry on the staff. This is not to say the writers on the staff had shortcomings, but when I was thinking about the different things we needed in a staff and what the writers could provide, I did not think of sports nerditry enough.”
Still, Jones is proud of the show and looks back on the experience making it fondly.
“I did not do that show to make David Zaslav happy, no matter what happiness to him was going to be,” he said. “I had my own reasons for doing it, and for the reasons that I had to do it, I think that I accomplished all of them.”
