Warning: This story contains major spoilers for Season 2 of Running Point. Please proceed with caution!
Heated Rivalry, step aside. A new gay sports love story is igniting television.
Season 2 of Netflix‘s Running Point introduces a new basketball player, Tommy White (Jake Picking), who shakes up the show as the secret lover of Sandy Gordon (Drew Tarver), the chief financial officer of the Los Angeles Waves and the younger half-brother of the team’s president, Isla Gordon (Kate Hudson, who’s also a producer).
“We talked about Sandy dating a player secretly in Season 1, but we just didn’t get there in a packed first season of things to do,” co-creator, writer, and executive producer David Stassen tells Gold Derby exclusively. “It was always in our mind. The whole idea of dating someone you work with in secret is very full of conflict and problems.”
“On top of that,” he continues, “it’s the world of professional macho sports, and this guy is maybe not so open about it. Sandy is uptight about his job and also wouldn’t be open about it for a variety of reasons. We built this character to be a stylish, handsome superstar, and we think he’s out of Sandy’s league. It’s always funny to have Drew Tarver playing put-upon or thinking he’s low priority in the world. To have a guy like him, who he thinks he couldn’t get, was a fun twist. And then to see where it goes — where he can’t stand the guy because he’s annoying and not that intelligent — was really fun to play with all season.”
Fans of Patriots Day (2016), Top Gun: Maverick (2022), and Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood (2020) should already be familiar with Picking’s work, but Stassen knew him from something else: “I was an on-set writer and producer of the movie Blockers, and I think he was a local hire in Atlanta, and he challenges John Cena to a butt-chugging contest where they do a beer bong up their ass. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, this kid’s funny.’ And then I saw him in a couple things, including the Ryan Murphy show, and knew he was athletic and the right age range, and it just kind of worked out.”
The writers’ room for Season 3 opened in early April, so Stassen isn’t quite sure yet whether the Sandy-Tommy relationship will continue. “We’re going to dig into everything. I’m not sure where that will go,” he reveals. “As writers of half-hour, you don’t want characters to stay in a relationship for too long, because you want them to be meeting new people and having new challenges.”
However, the showrunner reiterates that at the end of Season 2, “Tommy’s on the team. He’s a world champ and he’s got a fashion label as a backstory. So he’s in L.A. He’s in the right place for his career. I don’t know if he’s going to be with Sandy or not yet.”
The second season ended on a huge cliffhanger, with Ken Marino’s businessman Al Fleischman joining up with Justin Theroux’s drug-addicted Cam Gordon and Jay Ellis’ coach Jay Brown to bring a rival basketball team to Los Angeles. What does Stassen hope viewers are wondering after they watch that finale?
“I’m hoping that people think, ‘Oh my god, what does this mean for Isla and for the Waves’ grip on the city of Los Angeles?'” Stassen says. “They’re the world champs. They own the town. But now a team across the city with more money and a big, splashy grand opening is coming and they’re going to try and steal their lunch money, steal their fans, steal their players, steal their advertisers, steal their season ticket holders. There’s going to be a lot of challenges for Isla and the family as Cam tries to take a foothold in the city of L.A.”
The addition of Isla-centric flashbacks in the game-winning climax was something unique for the show. “We tried it without the flashbacks, but it was too much like Season 1,” he explains. “We wanted to mix it up and have it feel a little weightier. By extending it, you build up the emotion, you build the tension. Using the flashbacks to remind everyone of everything Isla’s gone through to get to this moment was hopefully a powerful little addition.”
Speaking of Isla’s journey, she had three potential love interests in Season 2: her fiancé, Lev Levenson (Max Greenfield); the team’s former head coach, Jay Brown (Ellis); and a hockey team owner, Luke McShay (Scott Speedman). But Stassen isn’t necessarily personally rooting for any of them to “end up with” Isla.
“They’re all such likable guys,” he begins, “and we didn’t do a situation where you write one of them as in Bridget Jones’s Diary, where Hugh Grant is kind of a cad, but she likes him, and she ends up with Colin Firth, who’s an actual nice guy. These are all good options for Isla. It speaks to the quality of the actors that we’re lucky enough to get that you can see an argument for all of them. But Max Greenfield is so charming and they have such a great dynamic, you wonder, maybe does she find her way back to him by the end of the series? Don’t know yet.”
Shifting gears to Hudson’s Best Actress Oscar nomination for Song Sung Blue, Stassen says Hudson was due in the editing room for Season 2 of Running Point the morning of the announcement.
“I woke up and she had the nomination,” he tells us. “I was like, ‘Well, she won’t come today.’ And sure enough, she was in post with me an hour after she got the Oscar nomination, working on the last two episodes of the season. That’s the work that she puts into stuff, and it probably shows in her nomination for Song Sung Blue.”
He adds: “On a personal level, I was just so happy for her. And we’ll see what it means to the show. I’m sure it can only mean good things.” Season 2 is eligible at the 2026 Emmys.
Hudson’s producing duties on Running Point don’t get highlighted enough, Stassen believes. “She helps produce the show on a number of levels. She always has good instincts about where her character is. And then, as a producer, she lends her name to the show and she gets people like Octavia Spencer and Nicole Richie to come and play with us for a week.” He concludes, “There’s a lot of things she brings to the show that only Kate can bring.”
The first two seasons of Running Point are streaming now on Netflix.
