Charles Barkley is staying busy outside of Inside the NBA.
Barkley’s Round Mound Media has partnered with actor Justin Hartley’s ChangeUp Productions to produce So U Think U Can Sports?, a sports comedy podcast set to debut this fall on Lemonada Media, according to Deadline. The show is hosted by comedian Eliot Glazer, a Broad City co-star and former co-executive producer on the recent iCarly revival, who has made his complete ignorance of sports the central premise. Glazer will also interview current players, coaches, and team owners beyond Barkley, so this is less a two-man bit and more a full-season project with Barkley as the sports authority anchor and Glazer as the vessel for every question a normal person has always been too embarrassed to ask.
Lemonada, which also produces This Life of Mine with James Corden and Confessions of a Female Founder with Meghan Markle, will distribute the show. CEO Stephanie Wittels Wachs said in a statement she audibly laughed at early script ideas. Perman, for his part, framed Glazer’s sports illiteracy as a selling point that has been conspicuously absent from the genre.
“Sports is everywhere, our culture is flooded with opinions, predictions, analyses, and Monday morning quarterbacking,” he said. “What’s been missing until now is a show hosted by a personality with an almost shocking lack of sports knowledge. And we found that guy. Round Mound Media is honored to be partnering with ChangeUp Productions and Lemonada on what will be the most entertaining sports show since Charles Barkley joined Inside the NBA.”
In June 2024, Barkley announced after Game 4 of the NBA Finals that the upcoming season would be his last on television — a declaration that arrived out of nowhere while TNT’s NBA rights situation was deteriorating, and one that he later walked back by pointing the finger at TNT executives.
He turned down offers from both NBC and Amazon before Inside the NBA was ultimately licensed to ESPN under a deal that kept Barkley, Shaquille O’Neal, Kenny Smith, and Ernie Johnson together while leaving TNT Sports in control of production and editorial. After spending nearly a year publicly complaining that nobody had explained to him how the arrangement would actually work — “They haven’t told us how it’s going to work,” he told Bill Simmons — Barkley came away from the show’s first few episodes on ESPN relatively pleased, telling Dan Patrick the network had “left us alone.” The irregular scheduling has remained a source of frustration — at one point this season, Inside the NBA went nearly a month between episodes — with ESPN content president Burke Magnus saying he wants to address the cadence heading into next year.
Barkley has a lot more free time than he expected. Might as well fill it.
