Chris Fowler on His Deeply Personal ‘Finding My Father’ ESPN Documentary

Chris Fowler called the project "a very interesting project for me" and "a long time in the making." The reason runs deeper than any assignment he has taken on in television. Fowler was 16 when his father died.

His dad had been recording tapes near the end of his life, hoping to turn them into a book about his experiences as a cancer sufferer and the lessons he was learning. Those tapes sat undiscovered for decades. "Nobody found those tapes for a few decades," Fowler said.

When they finally surfaced, they amounted to roughly 10 hours of content. Fowler said it "blew me away" and "set me on this path of wanting to learn a lot more about him."

That path is the heart of "Finding My Father." Fowler described the particular ache of losing a parent young: you don't really get to know them, and they don't get to know you as a fully formed person. His father died before Fowler's career, and never saw any of it. The two even shared a school, where his father had also gone.

What Fowler learned reshaped the picture. His father was a college professor, a theater professor and director, the kind of busy dad who gave a lot of himself to his job and his students. Some of those former students are now in their 70s, and Fowler got to hear how the work still mattered to them. "He still was making an impact on their lives with stuff that he had taught them when they were college kids," Fowler said, calling it "a great source of pride."

Much of that came as a revelation. Fowler said he had not had contact for many years with people who knew his father firsthand. A lot of the family friends had died. One who had not was Joyce DeWitt. Fowler's father directed her in summer stock plays before she was cast and became a star on "Three's Company." DeWitt sat down with Fowler and told him his father was the best and favorite director she had ever worked with.

"That was like a lightning bolt for me," Fowler said. "It was so nice to hear that."

Asked how his father lives on through him, Fowler was honest about the differences. The two were "really different." His father's work as an actor and theater director is somewhat related to what Fowler does, but his father openly craved fame and was, in Fowler's words, "a little narcissistic." Fowler said he likes to think he keeps that at bay.

On the tapes, his father sometimes sounds like Olivier or John Gielgud, theatrical and grand. "He didn't speak to us that way," Fowler said. It left him wondering whether the two of them would have been buddies, sharing things in common while differing sharply in personality.

There is gratitude underneath all of it. "I love him. He was a great dad," Fowler said, returning to the idea that his father left a piece of himself with a lot of people and made their lives better through his wisdom and example.

Still, the wish remains. Fowler said he and Drew both feel it would have been cool to have more firsthand experience of the man so many others got to know.