Survivor's Remorse

LeBron skipped the panel for his own sitcom.

The first question at Starz's Television Critics Association session in July 2014 was whether LeBron James could make it. He could not. Hours earlier he had announced he was leaving Miami for Cleveland. Survivor's Remorse, the half-hour he was executive producing with manager Maverick Carter, had started life in drafts set in Cleveland and then moved to Atlanta. latestnetflix.com's take is that Mike O'Malley, the Glee actor running the writers room, told reporters there were earlier drafts nobody had seen , .

Carter gave the show its title. Tom Werner, the Red Sox chairman, had called him about making a series from their jump out of poverty into sudden money. O'Malley, who still joked that he got cut from the freshman hoop team at Bishop Guertin High School in 1980, wrote Cam Calloway as a young point guard who signs a multimillion-dollar Atlanta deal and feels guilty about surviving. "Cam is someone who's generous at heart and feels guilty about having all this money when he knows so many who are still struggling," O'Malley told the New York Times , .

Everyone insisted the show was not about James. O'Malley said the characters were fictional and that, beyond reading a few scripts, James had no direct input into storylines. What James did do was sit for a table read at his house. "We went down to his house and read the first script out loud, and he loved it," O'Malley told Slate. At the Starz premiere, James said the hardest part of the real version was learning to say no to his mother. He described the feeling as guilt after spending thousands on a car or jewelry, then turning down a family member , , .

The sister who would not behave.

O'Malley built Cam a lesbian sister, Mary Charles "M-Chuck" Calloway, and told Slate that if she did something dastardly she should face the same fallout as everyone else. Erica Ash played her as blunt and loyal. Tichina Arnold played Cassie, the opportunistic mom. RonReaco Lee was cousin-manager Reggie. Teyonah Parris was Missy. Mike Epps was Uncle Julius. Jessie T. Usher, then a relative unknown, got the max contract on screen. The league on the show was generic. Despite James's name on the call sheet, Starz did not have NBA copyrights , , .

James finally showed up in season 2, episode "Guts," playing himself. Tom Werner did too. Critics who found the show treated it like a secret. The Village Voice wrote that if it had been on HBO or FX it would be the only thing anybody talked about. Metacritic later averaged an 82. It still never became Power. TVLine noted it topped a million linear viewers only once in 34 episodes , .

Starz killed it on 10 October 2017, five days before the season 4 finale "Answers and Questions." CEO Chris Albrecht said they were proud, then that premium cable could no longer ride a glide path, and that he was not sure there was a lot more to say. The official trailer had sold "pro money means pro problems." Four seasons, 36 episodes, a GLAAD nomination, and James as a producer were not enough , , , .