Those Guys Have All the Fun - James Andrew Miller [269]
CHRIS BERMAN:
I’m a simple guy. I don’t watch TV. I don’t go on the Internet. So I never watched Playmakers, but I knew if the league was pissed, I probably should be pissed.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
Was Playmakers a good show? It was excellent. It was terrific, but I don’t believe it was the right direction for ESPN, and I would not have green-lighted it because of the relationship with the NFL, our most important customer. My wife loved Playmakers; the only time she’s ever watched ESPN in her life was when Playmakers was on. And my argument is, I really don’t need my wife to watch ESPN. She’s welcome to, but I want her to like what we put on there, not what she’s looking for.
BOB IGER:
Playmakers was an aggressive—and effective—programming play for ESPN at the time. It was a critical and ratings success. It was a risk and it did everything you’d want it to do, except one thing: it upset a valued partner, in this case the NFL. At the end of the day, ESPN decided on its own to end the show after one year. And they were very honest as to why—they came to the conclusion that they were not in the business of alienating important business partners.
STEVE BORNSTEIN:
The NFL didn’t hate Playmakers, they were very embarrassed by it. They didn’t believe it represented their sport well, and so they were basically confused as to why a partner that’s important to them would embarrass them that way. It was nothing more than that. We frankly knew that all it was going to take was a phone call from Paul [Tagliabue] to Michael Eisner and Playmakers would go away.
GEORGE BODENHEIMER:
The league reaction wasn’t good. They were very upset with it. And at the end of the day I made a decision not to continue to produce something that was that upsetting to one of our major partners. It wasn’t good business.
MARK SHAPIRO:
It was very controversial, but no one was calling me to complain. They weren’t even calling George. They were calling Iger and Eisner, saying, “What are you doing?” And they were not fucking around. Given how many shows had already aired, I thought we had already stomached all the pain, but in the end, the league started to insinuate that our NFL deal was going to be at risk if we kept putting this in their face. I understood. I didn’t even fight it.
It was the first time in history that a show was canceled for being too good.
JOHN EISENDRATH:
The thing that I really admire about Mark was that when he called me to tell me the show was being canceled, he didn’t say, “Look, John, you know we don’t have room on the schedule next year for it, we need to put on the Iditarod.” He just said, “Look, it just was too controversial, and we got squeezed.” He was honest about it.
It’s awful having a show that is one of the few to be censored off the air. Shows die because they’re unpopular, but taking a popular show off the air? I don’t know if you could find any others. You certainly can’t find five others that have ever been taken off the air because some group told the company that owned the network, “We don’t want that show on your air.”
I would have thought that, for the billion dollars they were giving the NFL, ESPN could say to them, “Thank you, we will give you the billion dollars, now shut the fuck up.” And the whole idea that the NFL was ever going to go anywhere else—come on, really? ESPN has the ability to pay more than everybody else; that’s why they have Monday Night Football. So really, the NFL was going to shut out ABC and ESPN as a punitive measure? I mean, honestly! Who really had the power in that relationship? But no, lawyers and doctors can get written about, cops can get written about, even the president of the United States gets written about. Powerful people get fictionalized on television