television Page 18 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
Last Night's <i>Mad Men</i>, With The Dialogue Removed
Mad Men's final season began last night (technically, this is part two of the final season, but nobody really buys that), and while the visuals (Roger's mustache! Don's lonely apartment!) and Matthew Weiner's dialogue tend to get most of the attention from critics and viewers alike, there's a grea...
MLB's Awful Blackout Rules Are Finally Under Attack In Court
Major League Baseball's exemption from federal antitrust law may not be secure as we thought....
Pedestrian Mowed Down By Motorcyclist Behind Reporter's Live Shot
Tonight's ITV News in the U.K. featured bonus coverage of an accident outside St. Pancras railway station in London while reporter Ria Chatterjee delivered an unrelated story about Eurostar train cancellations. Chatterjee, a true professional, paid no attention to the chaos happening behind her....
What The NBA's Insane New TV Deal Means For The League And For You
The NBA announced on Monday that it had struck a nine-year, $24 billion media-rights deal with ESPN and Turner Sports. This isn’t just any TV deal. This one will have far-reaching effects on everything from how teams are put together to how you consume professional basketball. ...
Katie Nolan: NFL Won't Respect Women Until Sports Media Does The Same
Is there any real, tangible way female football fans can show Roger Goodell how grossly offensive his handling of Ray Rice's domestic violence was? Fox Sports' Katie Nolan starts out this video, posted today, with that tricky question. Then she diverges into deeper territory. ...
Fox Sports 1: Be A Cool Bro And Ignore Your Nagging Bitch Wife With Us
In case you had any doubt about the Fox Sports 1 worldview, they dropped this turd on us this week....
CBS Will Launch <em>The View</em> For Sports, Actually Sounds Proud Of Bad Idea
What is among the most pandering shows to women on TV? The View. What is one of the worst ways you can bring more female voices to sports commentary? Make a sports version of The View. That is exactly what CBS is doing. ...
Why Your Classic Children's Television Program Sucks: <em>Saved By The Bell</em>
Time for another look at the awful children’s programming you’re forced to endure before you can finally kick the kids out of the TV room to watch sports for eight hours. Previous installments in this series can be found here. ...
How Rupert Murdoch Could Go To War With ESPN
The blockbuster news that Rupert Murdoch bid $80 billion for Time Warner—and was at least temporarily rebuffed—points to an impending seismic shift in the media landscape. And, as the New York Times points out today, nowhere would that shift be felt more than in the business of televised sports. A F...
Showing Attractive Fans On TV? That Was One Man's Idea
Originally published on Slate....
<em>Jeopardy!</em> Vs. <em>Wheel of Fortune</em>: Which One Makes You Feel Dumber?
I am a Thought Leader of Television, and so I've been asked to ruminate on the Big News that Jeopardy!—yeah! the exclamation point! is officially part of the title!—beat Wheel of Fortune in the ratings a coupla weeks ago, the first time in over a decade, and is this perhaps an indicator that maybe A...
Which Sports Network Wastes The Most Space With Its Scores Ticker?
When ESPN introduced the "BottomLine" as an experiment on its new ESPN2 channel nearly 20 years ago, few expected the feature to become as ubiquitous in sports broadcasting as it has. Today, nearly every cable sports net has its own version of the scores ticker, and in an industry that clings to con...
Unedited, Unaired <em>WWE Smackdown</em> Broadcast Leaks Online
WWE Smackdown, set to air tonight, was filmed on Tuesday—that's no surprise. But for the first time, a pre-production broadcast of the show—with unedited crowd noise, missed cues and all—has made its way online. It is, like the Raw script that leaked last month, a genuinely fascinating look at how t...
Die Already, King Joffrey
This Sunday, 114 million global HBO subscribers and roughly 250 million web-savvy HBO non-subscribers will join hands and avail themselves of the fourth-season premiere of Game of Thrones, a quasi-medieval Prestige Cable Network Battle of the T's and A's with way more T's, A's, leering ultraviolence...
<em>Game Of Thrones</em> As Told By Emojis Is Great
These emoji-fueled interpretations of pop culture are all over the place nowadays, but this one is particularly inspired. You done good, creator of Game of Phones....
31 Buddy-Cop Clichés On <em>True Detective</em>
I really liked True Detective, and by the end of last night's wildly entertaining (and fucking terrifying) season finale, it became clear that the show is, at heart, your standard buddy-cop movie. It just happened to be brilliantly crafted, impeccably acted, stretched out to eight hours, and riddle...
Batman On Steroids: How The <em>NFL On Fox</em> Theme Song Was Born
It was March 1994, and Fox Sports president David Hill was on the phone with a new employee. Hill himself was something of a new employee. The network was only a few months old at that point, being built on the fly after Rupert Murdoch had unexpectedly outbid CBS for NFC broadcast rights. Hill was k...
Every Game Was Terrible: The Year The CFL Failed To Conquer America
Imagine fall Sunday afternoons without the NFL. No tailgate parties, no televisions to shout at, no games whatsoever. Nothing. Now imagine you're an executive for a television company that had just agreed to fork over hundreds of millions of dollars for broadcast rights to a league that has no games...