Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [266]
They’d always done World Series of Poker as a one-hour telecast each year, and then in 2003 they decided to produce more telecasts from the contract, and they went from seven hours that first year to twenty-four hours pretty quickly. The unusual thing they found is that, unlike their other properties—basketball, football, baseball, tennis—they could re-air poker in perpetuity, at odd hours and with zero production costs, and it would get a decent enough tiny number for the advertising dollars still to flow in.
Poker would wind up being shown more than anything else on ESPN. Nothing else is close—except SportsCenter. ESPN networks show between 1,500 and 2,000 hours of poker a year. One of the ESPN networks shows thirty hours every week of the year. They keep re-airing them and it takes up more time on ESPN than any other quote-unquote sport. It’s not a sport, it’s a game.
MARK SHAPIRO:
Get this: other than Sunday night NFL and Saturday college football, poker wound up being our highest-rated series. It tied Sunday night baseball! It also wound up being an incredibly valuable lead-in to Playmakers.
There were a hundred good reasons to do Playmakers, ESPN’s ambitious scripted series about the personal lives of (fictitious) pro football players, but there was one reason not to—and that one reason outweighed the hundred others. The strange case of this celebrated and castigated dramatic show vividly illustrates where reach and grasp differ at ESPN, and how the network’s tangled alliances can affect—and restrict—what goes on the air.
The brainchild of writer-producer John Eisendrath, Playmakers had the potential to take ESPN not just down a “road less traveled” but, in fact, down a road never traveled, at least for the all-sports-always network. The show was not escapist fantasy, but instead verged on docudrama. The private and public lives of the Cougars, the fictional Playmakers team, had striking similarities to the lives of real football players—and not by coincidence, either.
By presenting the stories as fiction, the writers were free to address real-life issues without using real-life names (and getting real-life sued), and the drama was absolutely overflowing with authentic problems representative of those going on in the league at the time. The second episode, titled “Piss Man,” included a scene in which a drug-abusing player injects someone else’s “clean” urine into his bladder as a way of beating a drug test. Substance abuse, such a touchy issue among NFL teams, was dealt with in many of the eleven Playmakers episodes that aired during its one-and-only season.
Spousal abuse was another of the social issues treated in scripts for the show. In one of the early episodes, a shooting occurred outside a nightclub where African American players liked to party, and, in a later installment, one of the husky Cougars is forced to admit he’s gay when “outed” by an angry boyfriend in front of the other players.
Now, why on earth would the NFL have a problem with any of that?
MARK SHAPIRO:
I told the world I wanted to go big on original programming. Big and scripted. That was the new twist. George asked me what the strategy was, and I said, “We need more women viewers, we need more casual viewers. We need viewers who are going to sit with us because they want to be engrossed in a story, especially women who are forced to watch us because of their sons. Eighty percent of our audience are hard x’s and o’s. If we can even get a little more casual,