Life of Reilly: The rise, fall and rise again

So moving from one job to another job with a higher salary is "selling out?"

What about moving from one paper to another, bigger paper?

What about moving from a newspaper to a website?

Did everybody who moved from a newspaper to The Athletic sell out?

 

I've never understood what made Reilly and Kornheiser think they were funny to such point they eschewed what they were good at for a lurch into third-rate comedy.
When I think of Reilly I also think about his dumb grandstanding at Super Bowl XXXIV.
The 'funny' guy wanting to get all serious on Media Day, of all days.

 

No, and I would trust that you know what I mean. Do we really need to rehash what Reilly did here? His career at ESPN was an absolute embarrassment, not only for his failure on TV but for his penchant for mailing it with columns and/or rehashing tropes and lame jokes. This was not moving to a bigger newspaper; this was trying to rebrand himself as a personality, which he once was on paper, but which he will never be on TV. Again, I don't blame him for taking the money, but in his heart of hearts he had to know he was abandoning his medium of success. He couldn't sell it, anymore than Simmons could sell it. I understand why they'd get bored or disinterested in continuing to write, same as I understand why Kornheiser and Wilbon did. But they sold out and stuck the landing. I don't think you can say the same about Reilly and Simmons.

"Selling out" has a nasty connotation to it, but ya gotta have something to sell before you can. To their credit, they both did.

 

Pretty shaky premise upon which to build an argument.

 

not when all the evidence in the world is there. If he was a success, he wouldn't have had the Twitter episode. Is that really shaky ground? Seems pretty cut and dry to me.

 

I think Reilly just got tired, and I don't blame him one bit. That column would have been a non-stop pressure-cooker of a gig. A great gig, but one that would have consumed anyone's life who tried to do it well.

 

You're saying he took the job knowing he'd be bad at it.

He didn't.

That he turned out to be bad at it - for any number of reasons - doesn't retroactively make him a sellout.

 

As for being a sellout—when I think of a sellout, I think of someone like Rod Stewart, turning his back on punk so that he could become a millionaire singing cheesy love songs. Reilly took a big raise to jump to ESPN to... to do what he was doing before, no? It wasn't like SI was CBGBs.

 

It wasn't simply that he failed at the new medium; it's that he kept doing the old medium and freaking mailed it in. His writing was garbage. He used to pen this shit for ESPNtheMag.com called like "go fish" or something, I can't remember the exact name, but it was like his fleeting thoughts that weren't column-worthy but which he deemed relevant. (Ya know, before he found Twitter). It's like he was on a word count that he had to meet per month.

Again, selling out is not necessarily a bad thing. We all do it; he just sold out, got paid and gave dick in return for the amount of money he got paid.

 

rod stewart turned his back on...punk? he, indeed, moved to cheese, but he was never even close to the sex pistols....

 

He was doing a television show at the same time he was writing for the website and the magazine and was clearly overmatched.

Doesn't mean he took the job in bad faith.

And yes, of course he was on a word count.

 

OK, fair enough, I don't think he took it in "bad faith," per se. I just think he oversold what he could deliver. Again, no harm in stretching yourself. But he didn't get hired to move into TV alone; he got hired to do myriad things, and he not only didn't deliver on the stretch gig (TV), he under-delivered on what got him in the door. I loved his writing back in the day. I have collections of his columns. He was an ace. I'd prefer to remember him as the backpage SI guy than whatever the fuck he's trying to rebrand himself as.