Toward the end of filming The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins, the cast and crew decided to surprise Tracy Morgan for his 57th birthday. As No. 1 on the call sheet, Morgan had been particularly generous to his co-stars, and his co-stars wanted to return the favor. So, they treated Morgan to a live mariachi band playing his favorite song. “You haven’t lived until you’ve heard a mariachi band from New York play ‘Super Freak’ on a studio floor,” says his co-star Erika Alexander.

The NBC mockumentary is the brainchild of 30 Rock creator Robert Carlock, his longtime collaborator Sam Means and executive producer Tina Fey, but Dinkins has been Morgan’s show from the beginning. In 2024, the Saturday Night Live alum was in the middle of his Neighborhood spinoff Crutch, but the looming acquisition of CBS by Larry Ellison’s Skydance Media had the comedian and his team looking elsewhere for projects. He put in a call to his old 30 Rock team and let them know he was going to have time in his schedule for something new. “We love Tracy, so Bob’s your uncle,” says Carlock, who was finishing Girls5Eva at the time. “We jumped on it.”

Carlock and Means took the same approach that worked so well when developing Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt: They started with their lead actor and considered his voice and what kind of character he could embody, eventually landing on the idea of a mock documentary about a disgraced football star as he attempts to launder his image and earn himself a place in the Hall of Fame after sports betting derailed his career.

“We’d been watching The Last Dance and Beckham and all those shows where athletes are trying to rewrite history and fix their narrative, and we knew that Tracy had been a high school jock,” says Carlock. Adds Means: “We were sort of obsessed with the flood of people who have final cut on their own documentaries.”

Morgan agreed off the pitch. “My rule is, if it makes me laugh, then it’s funny,” he says. “And when I heard the pitch, I laughed. And it’s relevant — at the time the basketball gambling scandal was going on, and now everyone’s got a casino in their pocket.”

The showrunners took the pitch to their partners at NBC, nabbed a pilot order and started assembling the rest of the cast. “Robert and Sam called me and said, ‘We’re going to send you a script, but basically we think the idea of you and Tracy Morgan together is really funny,’ ” says Daniel Radcliffe, who worked with the pair on the animated series Mulligan and plays the documentary director in Dinkins. “And they loved the idea of Tracy calling me ‘Arthur Tobin.’ “

The actor had been hoping to do something more long-term with the pair, and signed on immediately.

An offer also went out to Alexander for the role of Morgan’s ex-wife and current agent and business manager (more on page 58). “I’d never done a mockumentary before, but when I heard ‘sports agent,’ I was like, ‘Ding, ding, ding,’ ” she says. “Playing an ex-wife can be a certain thing, but I was, like, ‘OK, this woman is handling her business.’ Also, with people like Tina Fey and Tracy Morgan backing this idea, I figured if it failed, no one would blame me.”

SNL alum Bobby Moynihan and (relative) newcomers Precious Way and Jalyn Hall filled out the cast. Before filming began, Morgan had the entire production to his New Jersey mansion for a family dinner catered by the multiple restaurants he owns, including Swoony’s in Brooklyn. “I got that from Tina,” he says. “We need to be a family, not just a team, and food brings people together. Once you get to know a person, the timing is there.”

Adds Alexander: “It was honestly beautiful to see him in his house. He’s surrounded by [live] sharks, tarantulas, I think there are piranhas. He has a bowling alley. He’s a big kid, and he kept saying, ‘We’re supposed to be funny, so we need to have fun.’ “

On set, Morgan took more creative tone-setting liberties. He’d emerge from his dressing room with his assistant (and restaurant business partner) in tow, carrying a boom box blasting Motown — the television version of a walk-up song. “There was one time when they were playing ‘In the Air Tonight,’ and he timed his entrance to the drum solo,” says Carlock. “The whole crew started dancing, and people were just going nuts.”

Despite the theatrics, there also was business to be done. Successful network comedies are still rare, so stakes were high, and despite the veteran group, there was an element of novelty to the production. “We’d done some episodes on 30 Rock and Kimmy Schmidt that were in the documentary format, but we really wanted to expand the form and do our own thing with it,” says Carlock. “Part of that was having Daniel’s character be such an integral part of the story as the director, and we were also trying to be very rigorous with the logic of the camera.”

They hired Rhys Thomas of Documentary Now! to direct the pilot and kept to a two-camera setup. “You have to imagine that Arthur’s camera crew was there, and they didn’t get any pickups or do any second takes,” says editor Kyle Gilman. “So it was important that the camera operators didn’t anticipate what was going to happen next — Bobby Moynihan needs to come into the room, and then there’s a quick pan over, and the camera finds him halfway through his line, which is of course against the instincts of almost everyone on set.”

The rapid-fire joke structure and absurdity of Morgan’s character (maxims like “Books are brain movies”) created the opportunity for the characters to break the fourth wall, delivering deadpan Jim Halpert-esque looks directly to camera. Some of the glances were written directly into the script, but others came naturally. “There’s a conversation going on in this show that must include the fourth wall,” says Alexander. Radcliffe agrees: “I did end up saying to the directors, ‘I’m going to do a lot of these glances, but please don’t use them all because that would be insane.’ I’m doing a film this summer, and I’m going to have to make sure I’m not still doing takes to camera.”

In true Carlockian form, Dinkins also includes what they call “jump cuts”: a quick flashback scene to help illustrate a joke. A favorite among the staff is a jump cut to an optometrist’s office labeled “Epstein’s Eye-Land,” and a recurring flashback about Radcliffe’s character having a meltdown on a Marvel movie set was vastly improved by a suggestion from Fey that he direct his ire toward tennis balls that were stand-ins for CGI elements. Carlock and Means learned from 30 Rock that as easy as they are to put on the page — and as much as they like to break up the dialogue — every flashback scene requires building a set and changing an actor’s costuming and glam. During the pilot, they tried out de-aging and thinning Morgan to make him look more like an NFL player for his flashbacks, but quickly pivoted to just throwing on a wig and a mustache. “If it’s funny, we going with it, and that was funny,” says Morgan.

Returning to network was a homecoming and the source of some unique challenges for this team — among them, the not-so-small matter of corporate synergy. NBC is under a long-term media rights partnership with the NFL, which includes the coveted Sunday Night Football slot. That meant they needed commissioner Roger Goodell’s blessing for a major plot point of Dinkins. They shot two versions of the pilot, one in which Reggie was a former New York Jets player and one that depicted him in a generic green uniform. “We really didn’t want to have to say he played for, like, the New York Shark Wings,” says Means.

Luckily, the NFL has a sense of humor. Morgan, who notes that he first started getting positive feedback on the show while attending Knicks games, says he would love to bring in some retired NFL players to guest star in the future. (“Maybe we have Lawrence Taylor playing a barista, or Barry Sanders or Eli Manning.”) An idea that once seemed like a long shot is now entirely within the realm of possibility — in a moment of kismet, halfway through Cinco de Mayo, the entire cast got the news that they were renewed for a second season. Cue the mariachi band.

“The first time I met Tracy Morgan was at the very first read-through of the pilot episode,” says Daniel Radcliffe of his The Fall and Rise of Reggie Dinkins co-star. “And he said something absolutely unrepeatable to me. He is unlike anyone I’ve ever worked with. Only Tracy could say a line like, ‘Books are brain movies,’ and have it make sense.”

This story appeared in the May 20 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.