“I mean, it was just like-this six to seven years of work and research that culminated into these two to four weeks of auditioning and getting the role and being on set,” Small says. There’s a lot of TV out there. We want to help: Every week, we’ll tell you the best and most urgent shows to stream so you can stay on top of the ever-expanding heap of Peak TV. Small submitted a self-tape for the role, was invited to do another audition over Zoom, and then got called back to another virtual session in front of producers. Soon after, Small’s sister-in-law’s friend happened to spot a new casting notice for the part of Bird. But Burnham dropped out in 2021, citing scheduling issues. Sure enough, there was a Larry Bird character-set to be played by Bo Burnham. “I heard about Winning Time,” says Small, “and I was like, I’m definitely going to watch that show! Maybe they’ll have a Larry Bird character within it!” Small kept shopping his idea around, and in doing so, he caught wind of a project that had already been green-lit and had also spent years in development: a program about the rise and fall and rise and rise of the 1980s Los Angeles Lakers, based on the Jeff Pearlman book Showtime.

Small researched and wrote and pitched the show for years.

In 2014, Small started working on a miniseries about Bird, based in part on a book he’d read and optioned called When March Went Mad. (Our interview, like all the others for this story, took place prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike.) “And so I was like, I’m going to write a role that I could play.” “I was trying to think about how to, you know, make this acting and writing career kind of move forward together,” Small tells me over Zoom in the middle of July. Later, as a film student at the University of Southern California, Small found himself mulling over Bird’s past as he considered his own future. Six-foot-4 hair the color of wet sand a stoic resting face. 33 on his high school basketball team in Los Altos, California, after all-but much of it was just the way he looked. Some of this was his own doing- he wore no. When Sean Patrick Small was a teenager, people were always telling him that he reminded them of Larry Bird.

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