LaVar, Lonzo and the Ball family have a Facebook reality show now
If ever there was a match made in digital media heaven, it is LaVar Ball — a person who has become notorious by cultivating a personal brand marked by willingness to share wild, often dumbfounding and sometimes problematic takes to, about and around his family — and Facebook, The Place For Finding Out What Your Aunt REALLY Thinks.
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And so, now we have “Ball in the Family,” a “docu-series” about the Ball family — LaVar, his wife Tina, and sons Lonzo, LiAngelo and LaMelo — set to debut Thursday on Watch, Facebook’s “new home for original video content.” Here’s the first trailer for the 10-episode series, for your viewing pleasure:
The series will reportedly depict a year in which Lonzo became a college basketball star in UCLA and got drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers, LiAngelo and LaMelo became two of the most talked-about prep players in the country, LaVar became a sports media mainstay (for better or for worse), Big Baller Brand became A Thing, and mother Tina suffered, and began recovery from, a stroke. Sounds like pretty fertile ground for dramatic storytelling.
If the presentation of the story seems familiar to you — the straight-to-camera interviews, the intimation of relationship drama between Lonzo and his girlfriend, the fourth-wall-pushing of LaMelo waving off the camera during a dispute with his dad — it’s probably because you’ve got at least a passing familiarity with the brand of reality television unscripted programming developed in the past by Bunim/Murray Productions. They’re the folks behind shows like “The Real World,” “Road Rules” and “Keeping Up With the Kardashians” … and, now, “Ball in the Family.”
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Whether the series provides the “unfiltered look into our lives” and glimpse of “a side of us that isn’t typically seen” that LaVar promoted in a statement announcing the release of the series will remain to be seen. He’s certainly proved capable of generating attention over the past couple of years; with the first two episodes of the series set to premiere on Aug. 31, and the rest of the episodes coming each Sunday starting on Sept. 10, Facebook’s banking that he and his family will draw all those eyeballs over to its new offering. One suspects there might be some more flagrant and reckless chatter in all of our futures. Will you tune in to find out?
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Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at devine@yahoo-inc.com or follow him on Twitter!
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