When Unrivaled, a new professional women’s basketball league, tips off tonight on TNT, fans will be introduced to a version of the sport that Alex Bazzell, one of the league’s founders, described to me as “a Broadway show on steroids.”

That spectacle will feature three-player teams rather than traditional five-on-five action, Bazzell explained as we stood on the league’s gleaming new hard court in Miami last week. Viewers will see the usual three-point jumpers and defensive stops, and they’ll also get off-court coverage of stars like Angel Reese and Sabrina Ionescu kibitzing in a Sephora-sponsored glam room. The court, the makeup studio and the rest of Unrivaled sits within a TV production lot: Make no mistake, the league is as much an entertainment program as it is a sporting competition.

Fueled by tens of millions in venture capital, the setup is a careful calibration of what Unrivaled thinks it’ll take to win an audience in 2025, all of it in service of a bold wager: that a fledgling league can actually turn itself into a lasting business, a tantalizing prospect but one that’s been difficult to seize in the past.