There’s a great piece by Matt Feeney on Slate today articulating just about everything I’ve been saying about “SportsCenter” for the past year: the anchors are in love with the sounds of their own voices, they shill constantly for network programming, the catchphrases suck, it’s all white people trying to pull off a hip-hop aesthetic, and none of them can pull off the genius chemistry of former anchors Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann.
In other words, it’s unwatchable.
Feeney totally hits the nail on the head, except that he forgets to mention the tedious “argument” segments, the game-show bits with athletes playing Taboo, and Stuart Scott. Other than that, great stuff. The money graf:
Dan and Keith infused SportsCenter with a knowingness (while miraculously avoiding smugness) that turned the show into a kind of meta-history of sports. In the thickly hyped world of sports television, this layer of irony was a valuable thing. In contrast, the current roster of Dan-and-Keith wannabes offers all the critical distance, and all the journalistic detachment, of a Gatorade commercial.Posted by Stephen Silver at April 1, 2004 05:30 PM