Blake Griffin’s Late Night TV Career Is Here, and He’s Doing It His Own Way

The first thing Blake Griffin does after settling into our Zoom call (following, of course, the opening pleasantries; “El Niño is a buzz word in Los Angeles these days,” he says of the city’s unusually warm weather stretch) is take a trip down memory lane.

“When I was with the Clippers, one day we were in the training room,” Griffin tells Sports Illustrated. “We used to always like to have TVs on in the training room before practice. First Take was on. It was the height of Skip [Bayless] and Stephen A. [Smith], and the topic was our team. They're both just going back and forth, back and forth. We're all sitting there, listening to it and dying laughing. They were both just saying things that were so wrong, and making something out of nothing.

“I remember sitting there just thinking of myself after that, being like, ‘Man. Where do you go to not just hear about what happened last night or whatever the newest debate is, but where do you go to hear what actually matters to sports fans?’ Because there's plenty of shows, and there's shows that do it really well. First Take, I'm not knocking First Take because it's a show that people obviously love to consume. But where’s that show that’s fact-based and delivering information on topics that affects fans?”

A decade later, give or take, Griffin decided to make that show for himself: The Stepback With Blake Griffin. Citing Last Week Tonight With John Oliver and The Tonight Show as inspirations, Griffin approached Amazon with a pitch to create a late-night sports show that dips more than a toe into the comedy waters. With weekly releases on YouTube and Prime Video beginning on Oct. 20, the longtime NBA star plans to tackle the biggest issues in sports today with curiosity and humor in equal measure.

“It’s deep dives on issues in sports that I think are important and that affects me as a fan—whether that's NIL, whether that's analytics taking over so much of sports, whether it's youth sports,” Griffin explains. “Late night is sort of a dying genre in a way, but I wanted it to be late night because there's a live studio audience and there's a comedic element to it. But it's late night for today's world and how the media landscape is.”

Indeed, The Stepback With Blake Griffin is something of a hybrid version of late night. The live studio audience will be present and Griffin will play host, the center of the show’s solar system for every minute he’s on stage with guests revolving around him. But it’s not a weekly reaction to everything that happens, as it happens—which is by design.

Griffin isn’t interested in getting caught up in the instantaneous news cycle. This is meant to be analysis upon consideration, not the first, second or even third thoughts on big developments in the sports world. He wanted to explore every angle, mull them over, and then delve into it with the audience armed with as deep a perspective as possible. The way things used to be, but aren’t so much anymore.

“The topics that we chose for season one are much more evergreen,” he says. “There's certain topics. I mean, this happens to me when I watch John Oliver, but I'm like, oh, I remember he had an episode on this and it's come back around. Hopefully a lot of these episodes, the way we wrote them and the way they'll air means they will be able to live on past what's actually happening today. It would never be just, react the night or the day after something may happen, you know? We’re all so reactive now.

“I would love to get it to a place where we are getting closer to shoot to air, but being able to take, literally, no pun intended, to step back and actually gather all the information and put together a perspective … that's what interested me the most.”

It’ll be a unique blend of familiar and new experiences for the six-time All-Star. Upon retiring from basketball in 2024, Griffin joined the NBA on Prime desk as an analyst for the streamer’s first season holding NBA broadcast rights. It was there the public began to really get to know Griffin, from the smart analysis to the easy laughs. It’s sports; it’s supposed to be fun. Sports talk television can inform you and make you laugh (on purpose, not the way his old teammates laughed at First Take).

“I'm hoping that people realize from my show that they'll learn something about these subjects,” says Griffin. “As a sports fan and as an athlete, I thought I understood, for example, NIL. What’s happening and how we got to this point. But once we start digging in, I was learning so much about what's actually happening. Where is it going? What do we think could be bad about this? How could it be good moving forward? That’s, I think, a little bit different than you're getting in any show today.

“Then the comedy aspect of it, that's what keeps me coming back to John Oliver. That's what honestly keeps me locked in is because you can talk about a serious subject, but you can also enjoy it and have fun and get laughs. That’s just what I gravitate to.”

Despite his professional experience taking place in the basketball world, this isn’t a basketball show. Audience members have limitless options to hear former athletes tell war stories (like former point guard Jeff Teague on the 520 Club podcast, who tells “the best stories in sports” according to Griffin). Every studio show employs retired stars to offer their expertise on the sport they played. But Griffin never envisioned this show as a vehicle for him to talk about the NBA. Instead it’s a space to explore what he feels are important subjects for any sports fan.

“I played every sport growing up. I'm still a huge fan of football, baseball. I just enjoy sports,” he says. “The women's softball College World Series is absolutely electric. Every spring, every year. I'm just like, well, can we get more of this on TV? I am a huge fan of basketball, but (the rest is what) makes it so fun for me. I'm not hosting because I’m like, ‘Hey, I played so I know what I'm talking about here.’ I'm hosting because I played and there's still questions that I have about all these topics.”

The end product is a result of accumulated experiences. Griffin first did stand-up comedy in 2015, which he points to as a foundational experience in regards to the art of writing, setting up and executing a punchline. NBA on Prime offered a peek behind the curtain of television production; even more, the time constraints of such a product forced Griffin to tighten up his on-camera delivery. If he only has 30 seconds to get his point across, every word matters.

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The Stepback With Blake Griffin will offer him more space to explore and numerous avenues to get a laugh out of the studio audience. It will showcase every part of Griffin’s personality in that way—from the inquisitive mind of the thinking sports fan to the sly, witty demeanor of the funny co-worker everyone enjoys being around.

“I’m hoping to make sense of things that sometimes are overlooked or aren't covered to the depth that we're doing this,” Griffin says. “Me being a fan of sports and always wanting to know about how different things work or how different things affect the product that we all know and love.”

Then he offers the Hollywood grin that will be seen constantly throughout every episode.

“So, you know, hopefully people like it.”

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