EXCLUSIVE: The WNBA is getting its first ever scripted TV sequence. Peacock is creating a sequence titled The W.
The sequence, set on the earth {of professional} ladies’s basketball, which is having a second with stars corresponding to Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, comes from two-time WNBA All-Star Chiney Ogwumike and GLOW creators Carly Mensch and Liz Flahive.
The half-hour challenge follows a hot-shot rookie WNBA participant and her inexperienced agent navigating the wild ups and downs of the world of girls’s skilled basketball. It’s loosely impressed by Ogwumike and her longtime enterprise companion and agent, Allison Galer, who selected an unconventional path after Ogwumike, who was the primary choose within the 2014, selected the 24-year outdated as her rep. It’ll have a look at the “glamour and grind” of girls’s sports activities.
Ogwumike was drafted by the Connecticut Solar earlier than being traded to the Los Angeles Sparks in 2019. She additionally signed a take care of ESPN in 2018 and in 2020 turned the primary Black lady to host a nationwide radio present for the Disney-owned sports activities community. She can be an in-studio analyst for the NBA Immediately.
Flahive and Mensch, who ran Netflix’s wrestling comedy drama GLOW for 3 seasons, will function showrunners for The W and can co-write the pilot with Tori Collins, who labored on Jamie Foxx’s Netflix comedy Dad Cease Embarrassing Me!
Common Tv is the studio and is producing with of Condé Nast’s Glamour Studios and Victorius. It will likely be exec produced by Ogwumike, Galer, Flahive, Mensch, Helen Estabrook, Lajoie St. George, and Jodi Hildebrand.
It additionally marks the primary challenge for Ogwumike’s manufacturing firm Victorious. Ogwumike and Galer beforehand created and exec produced ESPN Movies documentary 144, which documented the 2020 WNBA season within the bubble.
Allison Galer / Carly Mensch and Liz Flahive (Courtesy of Topics)
“Our mission with Victorious is to construct a future the place ladies in sports activities can win massive,” stated Ogwumike. “Some of the invaluable classes that I’ve realized as an expert athlete, broadcaster, and ambassador is that we not have to attend for alternatives, we are able to create them. We’re in an period the place boundaries are being damaged, ceilings are being shattered and the world is lastly taking discover. And with our groundbreaking first challenge, we are going to convey the principle subject to the mainstream. In that spirit, Victorious is a purpose-driven platform that can forge new pathways for us to have a good time our personal wins.”
“With Victorious and our first-of-its-kind scripted challenge, we’re creating significant alternatives that present ladies in sports activities successful on the highest ranges,” added Galer. “As an advocate and teammate of feminine athletes for over a decade, I do know firsthand the ability of girls’s sports activities and its distinctive potential to seize hearts and minds. With media protection accelerating, famous person standing shining, and funding increasing, Victorious would be the go-to automobile for girls’s sports activities tales to succeed in and captivate international audiences.”
“Glamour has a longstanding historical past of championing, spotlighting, and honoring feminine athletes,” stated Glamour’s World Editorial Director Samantha Barry. “With extra eyes centered on the world of girls’s sports activities than ever earlier than, we couldn’t be extra thrilled to companion with WNBA icon, Chiney Ogwumike, who has paved the best way for herself and others within the trade.”
