Blake Griffin's getting a late-night show, which is either a surprisingly good idea or the beginning of a very long series of jokes about athletes who should've stuck to podcasts.

But Griffin's not walking into this with no preparation. He's been doing comedy for years, building a production company and learning how entertainment works while everyone else was still thinking of him as the guy who jumped over a Kia.

The Stepback with Blake Griffin will debut Oct. 20 on Prime Video and YouTube, which lines up with opening night of the NBA season. The Wondery and Mortal Media project will have Griffin take on some of the more complicated parts of sports, including gambling, NIL, taxpayer-funded stadiums, analytics, and sports journalism.

So this isn't just Griffin sitting around with former teammates, telling old Clippers stories or reacting to whatever happened on League Pass the night before. He's pointed to The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight as models, which means he's trying to do something much harder: take a messy subject, have an actual opinion about it, and make the whole thing entertaining.

That is a lot to ask from a former NBA player. Griffin, though, might be one of the few with a real chance. He's spent years figuring out how to be himself on camera. Now he has to prove he can turn all of that into a show people actually want to watch.

This Isn't A Random Post-Retirement Pivot

Griffin was figuring out comedy back when he was catching lobs from Chris Paul.

During the 2011 NBA lockout, he spent three days interning at Funny or Die, where he filmed sketches, helped write scripts, and eventually did some improv with Will Ferrell. He later worked with Neal Brennan, the co-creator of Chappelle’s Show, on a stand-up set for the Just for Laughs festival. Griffin's gone up against Jeff Ross on Roast Battle and even appeared on the Comedy Central roast of Alec Baldwin.

And he didn’t treat comedy like some random hobby he’d pick up whenever basketball was over. Griffin recorded his early stand-up sets and watched them back like game film. He kept notebooks full of jokes and paid attention to the creative process behind his commercials. By 2018, he was already talking about comedy as a possible second career and saying he wanted to learn the business before he retired.

He didn’t wait until retirement to start. Griffin and former NFL center Ryan Kalil founded Mortal Media in 2016, and the company has since helped make the White Men Can’t Jump remake and Apple TV+’s Hello Tomorrow!

So this isn’t some out-of-nowhere post-basketball move. Griffin’s been working toward it for years.

The Desk Is Where This Gets Hard

Being funny doesn’t automatically mean someone can host a late-night show. Magic Johnson was one of the most charismatic athletes in the world when The Magic Hour debuted in 1998. It was canceled less than two months later.

Griffin has more real comedy experience than Johnson did, but he’s dealing with a different kind of challenge. All of The Stepback’s live-audience episodes were recorded starting in June and are already in post-production. The show also won’t lean heavily on guests. So this probably won’t feel much like Jimmy Fallon.

The extra time in the editing room should help the jokes. But it also takes away the easy escape hatch. There won’t be a celebrity interview or a former teammate around to fill 12 minutes if a segment starts to drag. The writing has to work. Griffin’s delivery has to work. And, maybe most importantly, the point he’s trying to make has to be worth hearing.

His first season as an NBA analyst on Prime gave us a pretty good preview of what he can do. He could criticize Ja Morant without making it feel like a personal attack and still find room for a Kawhi Leonard impression or a perfectly timed shot at Shams Charania. He sounded like himself, which is a lot rarer in athlete media than it should be.

Now He Has To Be Willing To Say Something

The announced focus on gambling might be the best test of how serious this whole thing is. Griffin's a FanDuel ambassador, and FanDuel is Amazon’s exclusive odds provider for NBA and WNBA coverage. So if The Stepback is actually willing to talk about the uncomfortable side of sports betting when the host and platform are both connected to a sportsbook, that’d make it stand out. If it never gets past “gamble responsibly,” people are going to notice that, too.

The same goes for the other stuff they promised to talk about. Griffin’s going to have to be willing to annoy some leagues, owners, sponsors, and even former teammates. That’s kind of the point. Late-night comedy works when there’s a real opinion underneath the jokes.

Griffin has the timing and the comfort in front of a camera. What he hasn’t shown yet is whether he can make a written argument every week feel like it’s coming from him, instead of from a writing room that just happens to have his face at the desk.

Now we’ll see if the funny basketball player can actually become a late-night host.

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