Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [142]
“From my previous experiences here and outside of ESPN,” Olbermann lamented, “the quality of this one show, which I thought was poor, could not be achieved on consecutive nights without inducing heart attacks in the booth and on the floor.”
He divided the show’s alleged flaws into technical and editorial—ten of each (“the top ten” of each, he said, indicating there were many more). Complaining that his role on the show “has devolved into that of a glorified announcer or emcee,” Olbermann said his coanchor Suzy Kolber, with whom he was not exactly chummy (she was mentioned only twice in the memo), nonetheless had his sympathy for suffering a similar fate. Since the show was a waste of his talents and skills, Olbermann complained, “anybody with any broadcasting experience could have come in off the street and done all I was permitted to do” and get away with it.
“The show is over-produced,” he wrote, adding that although the producers and executives had said they wanted a “loose” show with byplay, interaction, and ad-libbing among the assembled personalities—all of them under instructions to “have fun” on the air—the actual program was produced more like “a concentration camp.” He also found it by turns “laughable,” “pathetic,” “gratuitous,” “boring,” and, in the case of one feature piece, “tasteless.”
Olbermann wrote that the experience was akin to “running ahead of an out-of-control locomotive” or “driving to work while leaning out the window, prying the hood open, and trying to repair your smoking engine.”
KEITH OLBERMANN:
I did threaten to quit, and I did walk out, but I think it worked to the degree that it at least got us some idea of what the show might be like.
JOHN WALSH:
We never believed that Keith was going to quit. He was just always nervous about something new, especially if it took time.
VINCE DORIA:
I was never really worried that Keith would actually quit before the start of SportsNight. Where was he going to go? Keith and Suzy were certainly not a marriage made in heaven but they were much better compared to Keith and Mitch—there were two very accomplished, strong-willed and smart people with good-sized egos who clearly had gotten off on the wrong foot, and for probably no reason. I don’t remember this exactly, but I think somewhere along the line Mitch came into the building and didn’t notice Keith or didn’t say anything to him, and Keith took it as a slight, which led to one guy thinking the other guy had no use for him and vice versa. I still think were you to get them out somewhere on the same page, they could have had some interesting byplay between them.
MITCH ALBOM:
Keith was temperamental, but it didn’t throw me much because I thought of Keith as the TV guy and I just thought that’s what TV guys did. He would go off with a pipe—I don’t even know if there was tobacco in it—and sit in the corner, just looking off into the air. I would think, “I guess that’s what TV guys do.” I was a reporter; I was a journalist. I was there for credibility even though I had my sleeves rolled up. I was a serious journalist compared to Suzy, who was just starting out. She didn’t have a body of work. I think they probably wanted a mix of male and female. I was just worried that if he did quit, I was going to have to do all his parts, because he would have these scripts that were a hundred pages to go through every night.
SUZY KOLBER:
It was pretty ugly. I was told I was the cohost and Keith believed he was the host and I was supposed to be more like the sidekick. I can’t honestly say I remember being told, “This is what the show’s going to be like.” Keith quit a couple times before we actually went on the air. The weeks leading up to the launch were just horrible. I was talking it out with my boyfriend, and then I would talk to my mom every day.
The night before we went on the air, they were still making major, major changes. They were scrapping everything. We were all in this giant room while they were doing it, and I seem to vaguely remember Keith sitting on the floor in the corner.
I just