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Intrigued with “Game Theory” from the start, Bomani Jones knew he’d be a fit for the HBO project, but wanted to make sure all parties were aligned in their vision.
“The guys that had created the show, they had signed a pilot deal with HBO with somebody else attached to it, and something happened and that person was no longer working on the show, and then they went looking for a different person and they reached out to me. I got on a Zoom with them and they sent me the dek for the show, and the dek was very clearly intended for a comedian,” Jones told The Post on Tuesday.
“I read through it and I said, ‘Hey, the first thing I need to say is that I’m not a comedian.’ I wasn’t coming into this with the idea of I’m going to make you want me to do this, right, it needed to be something that was going to be good for me. So I said, ‘Look, I am not a comedian, but I’m the perfect person for this show.’ Like, if you could rework the show around me, I think it’ll be the best thing that can happen for you.”
Beginning Sunday, Jones will embark on the next chapter of his burgeoning career with “Game Theory,” HBO’s six-episode late-night series that will break down timely issues that transcend the world of sports. Although the show’s brain trust was sold on Jones early on, the timing of how events unfolded was unique,
“Where it got interesting with HBO was, this was shortly after they had agreed to bring me on to do the show with Bob Costas,” Jones said of “Back On the Record with Bob Costas,” where he is a current contributor.
“On that show, I’m bringing the perspective on sports, I’m bringing all this brainpower and all this stuff over there, right, so you imagine you’re HBO and they’re like, ‘hey, super smart guy that can talk about the real issues in sports, now you’re telling me that you want him to replace the funny guy that we just had on here?’ That’s, understandably for HBO, they weren’t sure,” he continued. “And so, they eventually agreed for me to do the pilot, we had some conversations back and forth, and a lot of executives were on-site when we shot the pilot, and then they were sold, they just needed to see it.”
The show itself will feature interviews both in the New York studio and on-location, along with an expanded segment based on an opinion Jones wants to share. Sunday’s episode will feature a one-on-one interview with Stephen A. Smith, along with an extended look at the legacy of Duke basketball head coach Mike Krzyzewski, who is slated to retire at the end of the season.
“We are going to have a deeper-dive essay on every episode, now that obviously has echos of what you see on ‘Last Week Tonight’ [hosted by John Oliver], but where theirs are a bit more explanatory, expository in the way they go about it, what we’re going to really be doing is taking a take that I have or some opinion that I’ve got, and then we want to illustrate that with all the tools that we have over the course of that,” he said.
Jones, who also hosts the ESPN podcast “The Right Time with Bomani Jones,” also looked to “Last Week Tonight’s” Oliver for advice on how to steer this new ship.
“This is all brand new to me, I’ve never been in this place, and so I had questions just kind of like how to support the staff and how to be the person that is overseeing all of this, and he was very helpful,” Jones said. “I talked to Stephen Colbert about some things and he was also very helpful in figuring this out.”
Jones began his writing career in 2004 as a music and pop culture critic and segued to radio four years later, hosting two shows in Raleigh. He went on to launch “The Evening Jones with Bomani Jones” podcast in 2011, followed by the weekly internet series, “Bomani & Jones,” with SB Nation a year later. In 2013, Jones became the co-host of ESPN’s “Highly Questionable,” which he starred alongside Dan Le Batard, gaining valuable insight over the course of his time on the series.
“Working with Dan on ‘Highly Questionable,’ for example, I got to sit at the altar of a master interviewer. I learned how to talk to people on television from working with him,” said Jones, who also hosted the former ESPN series, “High Noon.”
Excited about what lies ahead, Jones is looking forward to sharing this new experience with his talented “Game Theory” team.
“I’m excited about the fact that we get a chance to do six episodes of a show like this on HBO,” he said. “I think that people get jobs generally, but even specifically jobs like this, and they view it as a referendum on themselves. They look at what they’re doing and they’re like, ‘well what does it mean if they don’t pick it up? What does it mean if it’s not good’ or so forth and so on, and I’m viewing this as, ‘Hey man, we’ve got a chance.’ No matter what happens, at the end of this, all of us will have made six episodes of television for HBO.”
“Game Theory with Bomani Jones” airs Sundays at 11:30 p.m. on HBO and HBO Max.
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