"We will craft the series to showcase Joe’s characterActually, I have less of a problem with Buck than most, usually. I just ordinarily find him mildly dull, neither a positive nor a negative, like sharing a table at a wedding with a youth pastor. The only exception is when he gets weirdly understated when exciting things are happening, as if his adrenal glands were installed backward. That's when I think he might be a serial killer.
He isn't one
and personality,"
He has none
said Bernstein. "Joe is a tremendous broadcaster
He is an average broadcaster in every respect
and we are thrilled to develop this new platform with him.
We are easily thrilled
This show, though, sounds both like a terrible idea and exactly the kind of thing we could see coming. Am I part of an extremely insular minority, or is there an unaccountably large gulf between what sports fans look for in sports broadcasting and what networks think sports fans look for? I had always assumed that a network asks two questions when it makes a decision, in the following order: (1) which option will maximize my profit (usually by increasing viewership in all or target demographics or by cutting my costs); and (2) if the answer to the first question is not conclusive, which option will maximize enjoyment of my programming for the greatest number of people? The fact that a network may get those answers wrong doesn't mean that it isn't asking them.
But what to make of the state of sportscasting? I know of, and have heard of, no person at all who has ever said "I want more of Joe Buck's analysis, without the interference of all of that on-field stuff." For that matter, I have never heard of anybody who thinks that the work of Joe Morgan and Tim McCarver -- two men who, if you listen to them, can actually make you know less about baseball, since they say so much that is stubbornly, demonstrably false -- is an improvement over dead silence, or that Emmitt Smith's assaults on the English language in the pursuit of the self-evident are a reason to watch football, or that Merrill Hoge should even be allowed to function in society without a state-paid aide. Maybe I'm just too locked into the Deadspin/Sports Guy/Internet world, but I don't even know anybody who isn't appalled by what Adam calls the "viking boat" of panelists on NFL pregame shows -- four or five veteran sportscasters, a dozen or more former players, seven or eight comedians and impressionists, a mime, a Maxim model (or, in a pinch, Gillian Barberie), Siamese twins, and a trained hedgehog, all shouting over each other.
I don't think this is a generational thing. The same people I see complaining about Morgan and Buck love Vin Scully and Marv Albert. I don't think it's a jocks-vs-non-jocks thing. The same people who complain about McCarver and Smith love Harold Reynolds and Charles Barkley and Gary Payton but can't stand Kornheiser. I simply can't identify the demographic that HBO is targeting with the Joe Buck show, or the people who ESPN thinks they're serving by having Emmitt Smith (or the inevitable Emmitt Smith replacement, a former player who is equally averse to actual analysis) on television, or the people whose loyalty Fox and ESPN think justifies paying McCarver and Morgan more than other, less stupid, broadcasters. It just seems like someday some network is going to go all Wii (or Moneyball) on everybody else and do something entirely different, like, say, what the fans actually want.
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