Any Given Wednesday cancelled by HBO

I think HBO viewers want more depth in their discussion shows than Simmons could offer. He's never struck me as a particularly deep thinker or a guy that wants to really scratch past the surface on an issue. He's a fan that used to be a funny, decent writer.

Whether it's John Oliver's show or the Vice News stuff or even Bill Maher...HBO shows do a good job of presenting stories and issues that don't always get the mainstream attention they deserve. There were a couple of moments when the Simmons show tried to go there but couldn't get it done successfully or had the right topic but the wrong guests articulating it.

 

I think he's capable of that, but only about the NBA or his favorite teams in the other sports (Red Sox, Patriots).

If he goes back into TV, it needs to be as host of an NBA discussion show on NBA-TV, TNT or Fox Sports 1 (sort of what Rachel Nichols has become with "The Jump"). A sports generalist isn't what he is or should try to be.

Having a regular sidekick to play off of wouldn't hurt, either.

 

Problem with a sidekick is it would be Cousin Sal or Lenny Clarke or someone that's a funny version of him and loves Boston.

There were a bunch of ways he could have went. He could have just aimed and fired at the silly opinions on the overload of "hot take" "embrace debate" shows on sports cable television these days. But television and Bill Simmons are not for each other.

However a variety of topics wasn't the issue. I was just watching a clip of a discussion on "fixing the NHL" and Wayne Gretzky spends about a minute talking about how the sports has expanded on the map and has a lot of great young players that are also good guys to deal with and then Bill Burr jumps in for the rest of the clip and talks about fighting or something else and cracks jokes and it just overshadowed Gretzky trying to make legitimate points.

When Wayne Gretzky is talking about hockey and what the NHL does well and what they can do better Bill Burr should sit there and shut the fuck up until he's finished.

That in a nutshell was the problem with that show. If I were legitimately interested in a hockey discussion that featured Wayne Gretzky, I don't want to hear Bill Burr's opinion.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/s...iven-wednesday-ringer.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0

New York Times post-mortem opens with a lede that speaks to a huge problem in the industry right now, and the saddest part of Simmons' failure.

This is true. He was also not a journalist, which fueled a toxic movement within the industry. Simmons' rise gave credence to a mindset of "anyone can do it." That's unfair to Simmons' abilities, but his writing from home with a fan perspective fueled a tidal wave of wannabes who never learned nor studied the craft of journalism (which Simmons did), and certainly never worked for a newspaper or magazine (which Simmons did).

The flood of untrained, unskilled copycats was the perfect formula for the current tech industry, which is less about innovation than it is taking an existing platform and exploiting it via cheap labor. SB Nation, Fansided, etc. exploited the masses of unprofessional fan-perspective writers to turn sports journalism into a pyramid scheme. Despite its philosophical shift of the last 3 years, Bleacher Report was the originator and most effective in this process.

The sad irony of Simmons' failure -- which includes The Ringer getting just 600,000 visitors a month -- is that he's made efforts to cultivate more traditional journalistic outlets, that pay real journalists actual wages for their work. Of course, one could make the argument Grantland would still be up and running today were it not for Simmons' ego, which highlights a completely different problem in the industry that I won't get into here.

 

That's gonna sting. And lead to a 20-year feud.

 

Perhaps, but it's funny.

 

Seems to be a lot of schadenfreude among the media about Simmons' misfortunes. Collinsworth doesn't seem like he'd be particularly thin skinned. Reply seemed personal.

 

Wonder if it could have anything to do with HBO dropping Inside the NFL.

 

I don't know particularly what there would be with Collinsworth, but I figure Simmons' fuck-the-world attitude of late has put him in quite a few of these beefs.

Also it has to be delicious for these guys to watch Simmons, who rose to fame in part by telling everyone how bad all the broadcasting was, become one of the worst TV personalities ever.