The producer who almost torpedoed Ben Affleck’s career: “They were not going to do it with him”
If Ben Affleck were a toy, then he’d be a yo-yo. This guy’s career has been more up and down than a paddle at an auction. From hot topic to washed-up has-been several times over, you never know what you’re going to get with him. It could be an Argo, it could be a Daredevil. There is literally no way of knowing. Then there’s his personal life, which is a whole topic in and of itself.
Before all of the turmoil surrounding his big screen career, Affleck floated around a few TV shows looking for his lucky break. Alongside a kids’ show on PBS called The Voyage of the Mimi, the future hunk starred in the NBC sports series Against the Grain. He played Joe Willie Johnson, the quarterback of a middling high school football team transformed by a new coach.
The show was co-created by Michael Pavone and Dave Alan Johnson. Gary Johnson, brother of the aforementioned showrunner, served as a writer on the project. In an interview with Deseret News, Gary revealed that, if one executive had gotten his way, Affleck would have had nothing to do with Against the Grain.
“What Warren Littlefield had said was, ‘I just don’t ever see this guy on the cover of a magazine,’” he revealed. “When we were casting that [show], the network didn’t want him. They were not going to do it with him. Dave and his partner basically said, ‘He’s perfect. He’s the guy.'”
Warren Littlefield is a bit of a big name on campus when it comes to NBC. He served as President of the network’s entertainment division between 1991 and 1998, during which time he was involved in the creation of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Frasier, Friends, and many other series that would make the company a lot of money.
There’s an episode of Seinfeld in which Bob Balaban plays a character based on him, and he can actually be spotted in the series finale of Cheers propped up against the bar. He’s a very big deal in television, and it’s a small miracle that Johnson and Pavone were able to change his mind.
Fortunately for Affleck, he was given the part in Against the Grain. Unfortunately, the show was cancelled after just eight episodes. Despite decent reviews, the network decided it wasn’t worth their time commissioning a second series, and so everyone was forced to move on to the next thing.
Luckily for Affleck, this coincided with his appearance in Dazed and Confused, one of the first breakout moments of his career. As for the show, the concept was revisited in the 2004 movie Friday Night Lights, which was spun-off into another TV show that was significantly more successful. It’s supposedly getting another reboot in the near future.
If you look at the history of pretty much any successful actor, you’ll find a moment when somebody who supposedly knew what they were doing dismissed them out of hand. For Affleck, that person was Warren Littlefield, who must have felt pretty stupid when he heard about Good Will Hunting a few years later.
