Peyton Manning’s new docuseries captures Caitlin Clark’s historic season

Caitlin Clark (AP photo)

A year ago, Omaha Productions, the entertainment studio founded by former Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning, was wrapping up production of “Quarterback,” a Netflix series that followed Patrick Mahomes, Kirk Cousins and Marcus Mariota through an NFL season.

But he was also watching women’s basketball. Manning was close friends with the late Pat Summit from his college years at the University of Tennessee. Now, along with much of the country, he was being introduced to University of Iowa star Caitlin Clark as she tore through the NCAA tournament. He saw Iowa upset South Carolina in an epic Final Four game, and he watched Clark lose an action-packed final against Angel Reese and LSU. And, he said, he wondered: If there’s interest in going behind the scenes with Mahomes and Cousins, might there be a thirst for a similar window into women’s basketball?

A few months later, Manning was on a Zoom with Clark, he said, pitching her on sending cameras to follow her through what would become her historic senior season. Clark agreed. So did South Carolina’s Kamilla Cardoso and UCLA’s Kiki Rice. The result is a new four-episode docuseries, “Full Court Press,” that will premiere on May 11 and 12 on ABC and then be available on ESPN Plus.

The series is a testament to the star power of Clark, not that she needs more datapoints. She became the all-time leading scorer in college basketball this season. Ticket prices spiked hundreds of dollars when she came to town, and she was crucial in helping women’s college basketball deliver larger TV audiences than her male counterparts on Fox this season. Next month, the Indiana Fever are expected to make her the No. 1 selection in the WNBA Draft.

But it’s also a moment for her sport. The NCAA recently signed a new TV contract with ESPN that valued the women’s tournament at $65 million per year, a more than tenfold increase on the previous rate. Viewership of the WNBA is rising, too.

Throughout the season, Omaha sent cameras to follow the players at practices, their biggest games and to capture intimate moments away from the court. Like with “Quarterback,” “Full Court Press” will deliver three distinct storylines.

It will track Cardozo, a native of Brazil, and South Carolina’s second consecutive undefeated regular season, as the team looks to avenge last year’s Final Four loss behind a stacked roster and Coach Dawn Staley. The series had cameras at the SEC tournament where Cardoso was involved in a bench-clearing melee against LSU and also hit a game-winning three-pointer at the buzzer against Tennessee.

Rice is a sophomore point guard who came to UCLA from across the country (she went to high school at Sidwell Friends in Northwest D.C.) and helped the Bruins to a top-10 ranking this season while battling another young phenom in Los Angeles, USC’s Juju Watkins. And, of course, the series will chronicle the various records Clark set, as well as the circuslike atmosphere that followed her all season.

The docuseries genre has exploded in popularity since “The Last Dance,” a documentary about Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls, was a hit for ESPN, and the real time Netflix behind-the-scenes show “Drive to Survive,” which has provided a look into Formula 1’s success. Carlos Alcaraz, the winner at Wimbledon last year and the U.S. Open in 2022, is also set to get the docuseries treatment.

“Full Court Press” is Omaha’s latest foray into the genre. After “Quarterback,” the company is reportedly working on an NBA-themed version for Netflix that will include LeBron James and Jimmy Butler, among others.

“All of [the players] ask me a very good question,” Manning said. “They say, ‘Peyton, would you have done this if you were my age?’ It’s very fair, and my answer has been, ‘No,’ because there was probably nobody that I trusted that would have my back and would do this with the player being the No. 1 priority. Being a former player, I know how hard it is to be a pro QB, how hard it is to be a D-1 athlete.”

Clark, Cardoso and Rice have editorial input in the series, Omaha said, but not final cut. Omaha also made a donation to the NIL collectives at each of the schools taking part, but didn’t offer more financial details of the deal. Manning said there was nothing Omaha wanted to film that the players didn’t allow. The idea, he said, was to collaborate with the players on what their stories should be.

“Kirk [Cousins] wanted the cameras in his sport psychologist sessions, for example,” Manning said. “He wanted his kids to be able to see what that was like. This is guided by the players, and we want this to be a positive piece, to show them in their best light. So that’s what I told Caitlin. ‘You’ll find we’re not a distraction, and you’ll have ideas for what we could witness.’ The whole goal is to have this be a memento for them.”

Manning founded Omaha, named for his famous audible call, in 2020, along with former ESPN and Fox Sports executive Jamie Horowitz and with help from Josh Pyatt, an agent at William Morris Endeavor. “Full Court Press” was produced in conjunction with Words + Pictures, which was launched by another former ESPN executive, Connor Schell. Both companies have investments from Peter Chernin’s media investment firm, and both feature former ESPN executives selling content back to their former network.

Brian Lockhart, ESPN’s senior vice president of original content, said he couldn’t imagine a series like this 15 years ago and noted that its premiering on ABC “speaks to the importance of [women’s basketball] to our business.”

Manning has spent the season exchanging emails with Clark but said he’ll be happy as long as any of the series’ three stars brings home a national championship. (Iowa and UCLA are the top two seeds in their region.)