Why Vice TV wanted Rick Pitino and St. John’s on its network

The original plan for “Pitino: Red Storm Rising” was a tidy six-episode arc ending on Selection Sunday.

“We wanted to be as the last moment in that episode the team sitting down with the coach, finding out where they were going to be seeded,” Vice TV president Peter Gaffney told Newsday.

Sometimes plans change, though, especially when the planner-in-chief is Rick Pitino.

As the St. John’s men’s basketball team has risen to the top of the Big East and into the national Top 10, Selection Sunday has evolved from the uncertainty of last season into what could be a mere launching point in 2025.

“We’re looking into potentially ordering additional episodes,” Gaffney said. “We want to follow them through this run and see where he can take the team.”

Tom Farrell, CEO of The WorkShop Content Studios, which is producing the series, said, “Absolutely, the expectation is to follow this team deep into March.”

Such is life on the rising storm Pitino has conjured, with St. John’s 24-4 overall, 15-2 in the Big East and 17-0 at home.

Some of this was expected. When Pitino had dinner with Gaffney before the series was approved, he told him St. John’s would be good. But this good?

“Being in the right place at the right time sometimes goes your way, and it sure has gone our way this year,” Farrell said. “I feel like we’re catching lightning in a bottle here.”

Episode 3 premieres on Tuesday night. It includes behind-the-scenes fallout from Simeon Wilcher’s failed garbage-time dunk attempt against Butler on Jan. 4. In a clip provided to Newsday, assistant coach Taliek Brown is shown laying into bickering players in an expletive-filled scolding.

The show weaves all-access content from this season with Pitino’s personal and professional journeys.

It is part of Vice’s new focus on sports, with both live events and programs such as the Pitino series and another on Arkansas basketball coach John Calipari.

“We knew we had to figure out something that would make us stand out, and we thought that as the pay-TV bundle was shifting and moving more toward sports, that’s why a lot of people are keeping their cable subscriptions,” Gaffney said.

“We decided to really push hard into sports.”

Attracting consistent audiences is the challenge, so the more attention, the better. That is where Pitino comes in.

He has been a world-class talker for decades. That was evident in Episode 2, in which he gives a fiery halftime speech about dealing with adversity as St. John’s trails Providence by 13 on Dec. 20. The Red Storm came back to win that game, 72-70.

A clip of the speech went viral. Gaffney said that as of Friday, it had been seen by about 80 million people.

That is the power of Pitino. Gaffney already knew that when he went to dinner with him before “Red Storm Rising” was greenlit. But that evening together clinched the deal.

“We think that Pitino is a very ‘Vice-y’ character,” Gaffney said. “He’s not going to hold back . . . We feel he’s an edgy character. He fits perfectly with our brand.”

Even by Vice standards, Pitino’s use of expletives pushes the envelope. Initially, the show stuck to Vice’s policy of allowing one or two an hour and bleeping the rest.

“Now we’re talking about just letting them go,” Gaffney said. “Two dirty words an hour, five dirty words an hour, I’m not sure if it matters at this point.”

Farrell said of the cursing, “To me, that feels very authentic to who he is and how he operates, so I find it to be very, very real and raw. I’m in favor of it.”

The show works for Pitino as a recruiting tool and because he got some needed “name, image and likeness” funds from the Vice deal.

Farrell called the series “the project of a lifetime” for him. He said Pitino has been “an open book” who has taken the camera crews’ access seriously.

“There is no shortage of storylines with Rick Pitino and with this basketball team,” Farrell said. “Now that they’re on the trajectory they’re on, everything builds.”

Said Gaffney: “Rick has been a great character. The team has done well. So we could not be more thrilled with how this has gone so far.”

Neil Best first worked at Newsday in 1982, returned in 1985 after a detour to Alaska and has been here since, specializing in high schools, college basketball, the NFL and most recently sports media and business.