TV Page 13 - Sports News, Headlines & Highlights
<em>Boardwalk Empire</em>: Gone Too Soon, Though It Went On Too Long
Boardwalk Empire's fifth and final season starts Sunday night, but even its fans can't muster up the enthusiasm or the pathos that greeted the beginnings of the ends of Breaking Bad or Mad Men. Its critics, meanwhile, have been trying to burn this thing down since it began....
I Can't Stop Watching This Dude Try To Hit A 186-MPH Fastball
Ever wondered what it'd be like to stand in against a big-league hurler? Yeah, this is kinda like that, but if the hurler was, like, a Terminator or something. Here's former Japanese ballplayer Takeshi Yamasaki, trying to get his bat around on a nearly 200-mph fastball (the fun starts at around ...
Keith Olbermann Will Return To <em>SportsCenter</em>
According to a release from ESPN, big changes are in store for Keith Olbermann. Not only is his show being rescued from its ever-changing late-night time slot, but Keith himself will return to the SportsCenter anchor desk for the first time since 1997....
Good Night, Don Pardo, 1918-2014
Don Pardo was an announcer at NBC for 60 years. He started in television so long ago it was on the radio, in 1944. The heaviest moment of his career was in 1963, when he was "booth announcer" on a shift at WNBC-TV in New York. Pardo did an off-camera "rip-and-read," from a big marked-up paper printo...
Search For <em>MILF Island</em>: On Reality TV's Extreme-Matchmaking Revolution
According to IMDB, many people who like VH1's new self-explanatory reality show Dating Naked have also enjoyed a 2000 home video titled Totally Nude Aerobics. Which makes sense: Both titillate via strategic pixilation. What's different this time is the tantalizing prospect of watching real human...
Here's What The <em>Sports Jeopardy!</em> Set Will Look Like
Sports Jeopardy! finally has a premiere date: The Dan Patrick-hosted spinoff will begin airing on Sept. 24, and taping officially began this week....
Conan O'Brien Found Out About Robin Williams's Death During His Show
As news of actor Robin Williams's death spread Monday night, Conan O'Brien was wrapping up his show, which would air a few hours later. When Conan learned what had happened, he took a couple of minutes before the taping finished, and broke the news to the audience....
Keith Olbermann Torches The NFL For Degrading Every Woman Who Watches
Keith Olbermann's segment on Ray Rice was strong, indignant TV, resonant with everyone who believes a two-game suspension for punching out a woman is a clear signal that the NFL doesn't consider domestic violence meaningful violence....
We Live In The Golden Age Of Sports Documentaries
A piece in this week's SportsBusiness Journal is nominally about how HBO Sports has lost its preeminence in the sports documentary biz, and sure enough, it has gutted its in-house doc unit in recent years. But it's heartening to realize that even as the former biggest player scales back, the sports ...
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...
ESPYs Social Media Reporter's Segment Falls Apart, For Some Reason
ESPYs social media correspondent Deanna Kay did not get through her segment last night due to some unknown cause that was either a faulty teleprompter or the wrath of an angry God who had had it up to here with this people-reading-tweets-on-TV shit....
Why I Love <em>So You Think You Can Dance</em>, Dopey (Or Dead) Dads And All
Less than 10 minutes into the first episode of the 11th season of Fox's So You Think You Can Dance, a contestant's dad was onstage dancing to "Blurred Lines." To begin, he set a water bottle on the floor before him, and then, as though initiating an ancient mating ritual, he approached and hovered a...
Showing Attractive Fans On TV? That Was One Man's Idea
Originally published on Slate....
<em>Under The Dome</em> Has A Villain Problem
Stephen King's mammoth 2009 novel Under the Dome features two killer antagonists. One is, well, the dome itself; the other is "Big Jim" Rennie, a bully of a local politician who seizes the dome's sudden appearance as a chance to affirm his fiefdom. Too bad only the inanimate bad guy made the transit...
HBO's Majestically Bleak <em>The Leftovers</em> Finds God Everywhere, and Nowhere
Organized religion doesn't show up much in prestige television. Which is surprising, given the genre's tendency toward Big Existential Questions, and given how thoroughly Christianity is baked into how America thinks about itself, and given the ways the Christian Right and Mormonism and Scientology ...
<em>Nurse Jackie</em> Is Peaking With A Downward Spiral
"We need to talk about Jackie," All Saints Hospital nurse Zoey (played by Emmy winner and excellent speech-giver Merritt Wever) warns her boss as the penultimate episode of Nurse Jackie's sixth season winds down. That's an understatement. The show's titular caregiver and reckless drug addict (Oxycon...
<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...