Rewriting The Playbook: Creating a portal for a Netflix documentary series

Howard Gray
Wavetable
Published in
11 min readNov 17, 2020

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The Playbook (image: the lantern)

In our overwhelming world, entertainment provides much-needed escape. People become engrossed in entirely different worlds as a way to deal with life’s stresses. We immerse ourselves in games, books, social media, or the latest binge-worthy TV series.

Yet we’re also seeking to improve our lives and find ways forward, especially in challenging times.

Lifting the curtain on other people’s ideas, successes and ideals is one of the most compelling ways to get inspiration and momentum for our own journeys, while simultaneously quenching a thirst to get the inside track and go behind the scenes.

Netflix documentary series The Playbook aims to bring together these two worlds of entertainment and improvement through the lens of sports coaches.

Co-produced by LeBron James and Maverick Carter’s SpringHill production company, The Playbook profiles legendary coaches as they share their guidelines for greatness in sports and life. Season 1 features coaches from soccer (US Women’s team coach Jill Ellis, and Tottenham Hotspur manager José Mourinho); tennis (Serena Williams’ coach Patrick…

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Howard Gray
Wavetable

Adventures in entertainment, education and entrepreneurial endeavours. I’m an educator and executive producer based in NYC.