1 day Ago By Natalie Oganesyan
After a slam dunk first season, the team behind Running Point — the Warner Bros. Television show loosely based on Los Angeles Lakers owner and president Jeanie Buss’ life and stewardship — is prepping for the next game in the Kate Hudson dramedy vehicle. During Deadline’s TV Contenders event, executive producer and star Hudson, as well as co-creators and fellow EPs Mindy Kaling, Ike Barinholtz and Dave Stassen (who is also showrunner) joined moderator Antonia Blyth for a conversation about the show’s resonance across age groups and sports affiliation.
Related Stories Deadline Contenders Television 2025 Arrivals Gallery: Ellen Pompeo, Bella Ramsey, Melanie Lynskey, Christina Ricci, Paul Feig & More Deadline Studio At Contenders Television 2025: Brandon Sklenar, Christina Ricci, Elisabeth Moss, Ellen Pompeo, Bella Ramsey & More The creative team particularly credited Buss and her adviser/partner Linda Rambis, on whom the friendship with co-star Brenda Song is drawn from, for their no holds barred approach to mining their lives. “There’s no limits. In a comedy like this, there’s a lot of wild stuff, and then they don’t give us parameters.
And they’re not scared about what we might do, which, if someone was doing the show loosely based or loosely inspired on me, I’d be pretty protective, which isn’t good for comedy. And so they’ve been such great partners in this,” Kaling said of the collaboration, which was born out of Buss and Rambis approaching her due to their love of The Office. Watch on Deadline RELATED: Contenders TV — Deadline’s Complete Coverage Hudson, who had partially grown up with Buss back when she ran the Forum Club during the height of Wayne Gretzky’s time with the Los Angles Kings, added, “They were really hands off, which was really surprising.
We talked to them, we hung out with them. We would laugh about certain experiences that they had, but they really were like, ‘Go, have fun, play.'” (Hudson joked that as a “naughty teenager” she would try to sneak drinks from the club, while Buss would keep a “watchful eye,” later showing her pictures of Hudson as an 18-year-old as “full-on blackmail.
”) To bring the project to the screen, Kaling enlisted former The Mindy Project collaborators Barinholtz and Stassen given the similarities in their comedic sensibilities. Also instrumental in crafting the show’s language was working with Hudson, who Kaling said — like former acting partners Steve Carell and Emma Thompson — could balance comedic and dramatic elements in a “compelling” way. Part of the allure was also the family-centric dynamic at the heart of the show, about a tight-knit group whose members often don’t see eye-to-eye regardless of their warmth for each other.
“We were drawn to the fact that it was just going to be this powerful family that ran a really cool company, a really cool family business, but we spent a lot of time talking about how the siblings were going to be different,” Stassen explained, “and how they were going to bounce off each other and mostly not get along, but at the end of the day, they’re going to love each other.” Leaving Season 1 finale’s on a romantic cliffhanger of sorts — Isla Gordon’s (Hudson) simmering chemistry with Jay Ellis’ team coach is finally punctuated with a first kiss amid tensions between her husband — the Running Point team promised that “all the characters that people have responded to and seem to love so far are coming back in some shape or form for some amount of episodes, so no one’s gonna be missing.” Barinholtz added that they will be “digging deeper into [Hudson and Song’s character’s dynamic] in Season 2,” and are currently “in the nitty gritty of breaking the season” in the writers’ room.
For her part, Hudson added, “This is the first time I’ve had such a wide scope of people who’ve seen the show, from 13-year-olds to someone’s 97-year-old grandmother, and they all have a different feeling about my love life, which, I’m sort of like, ‘This is gonna make it really hard in the writers’ room to kind of explore whatever that is.’ But that is the fun thing about this show, is that it does hit sort of all of the different demographics.” Check back on Monday for the panel video.
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