Holding Court with Reggie Rock Bythewood

Youth basketball is the setting for the sports drama Swagger, but creator-showrunner-director Reggie Rock Bythewood makes sure the Apple TV+ show is about more than shooting hoops.

Ambition. Opportunity. Identity. Parenthood. Growing up Black in America. The series explores such topics through tales about competing players, coaches and their families, loosely inspired by NBA star Kevin Durant's experiences in youth basketball.

On the surface, Bythewood says, swagger is the bravado, style or confidence that people use to exude success. "But on a deeper level," he notes, "true swagger means having a cause bigger than yourself."

Much of the inspiration for the second season, premiering June 23, comes from his two boys. Now twenty-one and eighteen, they played team sports and attended a predominantly white private school. When teachers added Black authors to the curriculum, he says, some white parents anonymously told a local newspaper that "wokeness [had] gone mad" at the school.

"I wanted the challenge I saw my children going through to be part of the narrative of season two," Bythewood says. "A true democracy doesn't attempt to stifle voices from people of color. Hearing other perspectives is not a politically correct thing to do. It's the clearest path to expanding every child's worldview and giving them more knowledge to become more rounded human beings."

In the show, a history teacher asks students to answer the question: is democracy a journey or a destination?

Such queries come naturally to Bythewood, who started his TV writing career on A Different World, then went on to pen shows like New York Undercover and Players. He also wrote and directed the films Dancing in September and Biker Boyz, wrote the screenplay for Spike Lee's Get on the Bus and cowrote Notorious, about the life and death of rapper Biggie Smalls. He also created the Fox series Shots Fired with his wife, Gina Prince-Bythewood.

In team sports, he says, everyone must learn how to get along with each other, a challenge the characters on Swagger face — as do we all.

"In 2020, most people were rocked by what happened to George Floyd," Bythewood says. "Many in Hollywood wanted to listen more, and that opened the door to other voices. Now, three years later, is that urgency still there? I don't want to answer things for people, but I do want to raise the questions."

The interview for this story was completed before the start of the WGA strike on May 2.

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine issue #7, 2023, under the title, "Holding Court."