Last Chance U creator and Coach John Mosley discuss the pandemic-shortened first basketball season

Vulture

"I shed a tear watching how they put the story together," says Mosley in a joint interview with creator Greg Whiteley. "I shed a tear throughout the show but had a lot of moments off-camera that were very impactful." Whiteley recalls having to woo Mosley. Whiteley says his team wanted to do a basketball season since Season 1, but it was a matter of finding the right school. "We have a set of criteria," says Whiteley. "Everything from: 'How good is the marching band? How interesting is the town?' One of those barometers is: 'How good of a football team, or how good of a basketball team, are they?' It helps if they’re really good, but that’s not necessary. They could be bad or even mediocre, and if you’ve got a really interesting coach, or a really interesting town, or there’s some other compelling story — there’s a player there that’s up against something unique — we take all things into consideration. I don’t know, Coach, if you remember this, but we just went to lunch with him in East L.A., and just five minutes after sitting down with him, I just knew this is who we want to be with. He’s one of those guys that wears his heart on his sleeve, and we could tell he cared about a lot of the same things we cared about. It just made it easy to choose. We were pursuing him. We were wooing him." As for the abrupt pandemic end to the season, Whitely says, "from a human standpoint, it broke all of our hearts...From a storytelling standpoint, it was incredible. I couldn’t believe what just happened. But going through that footage that was so carefully shot, I’m so grateful for the format that we’ve stumbled across. We got to spend time and go, Where is the drama and the poetry in the way that season was ended?"