Bill Simmons Will Host A Grantland TV Show On ESPN

Starting this October, ESPN will air what it's calling The Grantland Basketball Show in prime time—" the first Grantland-branded television series." Who wants to see Bill Simmons do his best Harvey Levin impersonation?

Here are the particulars, as Capital New York relates them:

Grantland founder Bill Simmons will host the show, joined by a rotating panel of commentators and contributors, starting Oct. 21 at 8 p.m. ESPN will air as many as 18 one-hour episodes this season, including specials tied to the N.B.A. playoffs and draft.

This is pretty obviously part of the plan for Simmons, who's been hosting his podcast and doing TV for years—the video version of the podcast is a good bet to make up the DNA of the show. And Grantland is essentially an NBA blog, full of people you'd actually want to hear talk about basketball, like Zach Lowe and Kirk Goldsberry. Even Simmons has been on a pretty good streak this summer— his Carmelo Anthony column was his best in years. So focusing the "first" Grantland show on the NBA makes sense, since it plays to the site's strengths, and we can at least pretend that it will limit the amount of time that Simmons goes on about the Eagles and at what age Scarlett Johansson was the most fuckable.

[ Capital New York]