How a Non Sports Fan Went From Running LeBron’s Unscripted to All Content at Tom Brady’s Shadow Lion
One thing you need to know about Philip Byron is that he’s not a sports fan. Like, not at all. He knows it’s kind of weird that he recently left LeBron James’ production company for Tom Brady’s.
“From one G.O.A.T. to the next,” as Byron put it to The Hollywood Reporter. Pretty much.
At the SpringHill Company, James’ banner, Byron was head of unscripted and docuseries. For Brady’s Shadow Lion, he’ll oversee all original content: unscripted, scripted, features, documentaries and live programming. It’s been a pretty good run from a modest start at DanceOn, which in 2012 was selected as one of YouTube’s 100 “funded channels” (officially: YouTube Original Channel Initiative). He got a taste of scripted with Lloyd Braun, first at BermanBraun (also with Gail Berman), which transitioned into Whalerock Industries.
In 2016, Byron joined James’ SpringHill, where he was a “one-man band” for the unscripted documentary department for four years. Byron produced CBS competition series Million Dollar Mile, HBO’s Muhammad Ali doc What’s My Name? and about 50 other projects, literally.
You Might Also Like
It’s a good thing that James is “such a good guy,” in Byron’s words, because the hire was no slam dunk. (Pause for laughter.)
“I’m pretty upfront with people that I am not a sports person, which gets people confused,” Byron told THR — and, it sounds like, James and his business partner Maverick Carter. “But I love good stories, and I feel like I have a decent eye for what can sell and get made.”
Byron’s sales pitch says it’s better for business that he isn’tinto sports, despite the masters (of their sports, at least) he serves. “I think it helps, ultimately,” Byron said.
While there are a lot of diehard sports fans in the U.S., there are even more not-diehard sports fans, and that’s the POV Byron brings to his G.O.A.T.s. Or at least to his close collaborators. Byron says that the “biggest misconception” with working with these top-tier athletes is attending all the pitch meetings.
“I was very seldom needing LeBron’s time,” he said. When THR spoke with Byron, he was on day four of his Shadow Lion tenure, so TBD on TB.
At Brady’s banner, Byron, channeling TLC (the girl group, not the cable channel) says he plans to “stick to the rivers and the lakes that you’re used to”: In this case, that’s football — “the space that we should clearly own” — not basketball. But he also wants to make stuff that is “super broad.”
“The way I see it, the NFL audience is families, it’s women, it’s men, it’s young, it’s old — it’s all throughout the country, all throughout the world,” Byron said. “All those people that tune into NFL games have other interests, in terms of movies and TV and docs. So it’s like, how can we think about making things for them?”
Still, Brady, now an NFL analyst for Fox Sports and part owner of the Las Vegas Raiders, will be Byron’s “north star” — like James was at SpringHill.
What does that even mean? Well, one thing Byron wants to do is bring back the “great youth sports films” that he (and I, and maybe you) “grew up on.”
“I want to get into those great youth sports films that I grew up on,” Byron said. “There were so many of them back then: The Sandlot, Angels in the Outfield, Little Giants, Cutting Edge — it was endless.”
Also on his list: competition series “à la Alone or Survivor,” which Byron says “feels very ripe for us.”
“But I’m really not putting up any guardrails,” Byron said.
Byron and Brady sound like a winning combination. So long as they don’t run into the New York Giants. (Sorry not sorry, Tommy.)
