While many athletes and media personalities have launched their own production companies, it’s interesting to see one launch with an already-signed deal for a scripted series. That’s the case with women-focused production company Victorious, from former WNBA player and current ESPN analyst Chiney Ogwumike and her long-time agent Allison Galer.
That company’s launch was written up by Sportico’s Eric Jackson Tuesday, with Jackson noting that Victorious already has a deal with NBCUniversal streaming service Peacock for a The W scripted comedy series on the WNBA. That series will see GLOW creators Carly Mensch and Liz Flahive serving as showrunners, with Victorious co-founders Ogwumike and Galer serving as executive producers (alongside Helen Estabrook, Lajoie St. George and Jodi Hildebrand from Conde Nast’s Glamour Studios). Ogwumike told Jackson she envisions this series as largely unexplored territory:
Pointing to successful male sports-focused series such as HBO’s Ballers, Ogwumike said in a phone interview, “We have not seen the women’s point of view.”
She credits Penny Marshall’s 1992 film A League of Their Own with showing the possibilities of the genre. “We’re going to see a modern rendition,” Ogwumike said. “This is the first ever [series] for women’s basketball. We’re going to see what the league looks and feels like and what these women do to be successful.”
Of course, there have been attempts in this space. In particular, Amazon did a League of Their Own series, which only ran for one season. (A shorter second season was announced, but Prime Video cut it before filming in 2023 around WGA/SAG-AFTRA strikes.) And there have been a lot of sports-focused TV comedy/drama series over the years, with only a few finding longevity. But Ogwumike is correct that there hasn’t been one focused around a modern-day women’s professional sports league, so The W is treading some new territory there.
A further interesting note in Jackson’s writeup is Ogwumike’s involvement with 2021 ESPN documentary 144 on the WNBA’s 2020 season in a pandemic bubble. Ogwumike seems not thrilled with how that played out:
Ogwumike, who re-upped with ESPN last year, is the first Black woman to host a national daily sports radio show, and she already has experience in documentary production. She was behind ESPN’s 144 doc that chronicled the 2020 WNBA season, played in the COVID-19 pandemic bubble. The Emmy-nominated story was a career milestone but also a lesson; she says she realized she and Galer could have earned more had they worked separately from ESPN.
“Not only did we not get what we felt like we deserved, but people looked to us after accomplishing that and (acknowledged) that we know the stories that matter,” Ogwumike said.
There’s a more significant thing about the production of many projects that air on ESPN, which are moving at least partly outside of the company. Former ESPN VP (content) Connor Schell and long-time ESPN Films executive Libby Geist have been key to that with their Words + Pictures company, to say nothing of all the content coming to ESPN from Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions. (And those companies sometimes team up, as with the upcoming season of women’s college basketball docuseries Full Court Press.) With Ogwumike continuing at ESPN, it will be interesting to see if her new production company follows suit in striking deals with that company.
