Showtime’s new weekly interview series, “‘Headliners With Rachel Nichols’” to be premiered on streaming on Thursday with host Rachel Nichols, who is renowned for her past experiences at ESPN and Turner. The series will air in linear on Showtime at 10 p.m. following its streaming premiere. The first guest on the show will be Joel Embiid, the Philadelphia 76ers star and a favorite to win league MVP honors. Other NBA A-listers like Steph Curry, Dwyane Wade, and Jason Kidd will appear on the show in upcoming episodes. After May 4, the show will pause to let the NBA playoffs reach their annual crescendo in June before resuming with more original episodes later in the year.
Interviewing Elite Basketball Players
“Headliners” aims to bring a fresh perspective, to stand out in a crowded field of sports talk programming by offering exclusive interviews with some of the biggest names in basketball. According to Nichols, the show seeks to interview the best of the best and most interesting people in basketball. The show’s host, Rachel Nichols, stated that the idea behind the show is to provide an “elite level of player that you can’t, frankly, spend time with anywhere else.” The show’s goal is to offer a unique experience that’s hard to find elsewhere, to give viewers a “360-degree view of who a person is” and insights “that you don’t get from 6-second clips on Instagram.”
With so much saturation of professional athletes on TV and social media, “Headliners” aims to offer a quiet time to find out who these players are, their motivations, and their insights.
During the episode, Embiid, who hails from Cameroon and was the third overall NBA draft pick in 2014, talks to Nichols about his basketball journey as a teenager. The show’s 30-minute runtime allows for a detailed account of Embiid’s swift rise to a spot in an NBA-run youth camp, Basketball without Borders, just three months after he started playing basketball.
“We spend so much time saturated with professional athletes on our TV and on our phones and everywhere else that getting quiet time, when you can actually find out who this person is, is kind of rare amid all of the bright lights and the big motion,” Nichols said.
