Looking back at ESPN’s scripted sports content

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https://awfulannouncing.com/espn/scr...the-brink.html

By Kyle Kensing on 07/07/2023

Sometime, somewhere, you have probably heard some variation of the cliché “You couldn’t script it!” used to describe the inevitable improbability of sports. But damned if ESPN didn’t once try.

“Sports,” then-ESPN senior vice president and general manager of programming Mark Shapiro told reporters in October 2002, “is drama. And a scripted dramatic series is the next logical step in ESPN Original Entertainment’s extension of the ESPN brand.”

Shapiro’s promise of a scripted series came amid a yearlong deluge of programming experimentation from the Worldwide Leader in Sports. In 2001, ESPN was just five years removed from Disney’s purchase of the network, and had not too much further back than that been filling its daytime airwaves with aerobics instructions and low-level pro wrestling.

To wit, the last first-run edition of the Global Wrestling Federation appeared on ESPN in 1994; the final Bodies in Motion with Gilad aired in 1996.

A half-decade into the Mickey Mouse era, ESPN ramped up efforts to rebrand beyond live-game broadcasts and Sportscenter. But fall 2001 marked the beginning of a pivotal few years for the network, kicking off a period that Shapiro declared in a conference call in July of that year to be “an unprecedented chapter in the growth of ESPN.”

“People have over 200 channels, including pay-per-view channels, plus video, to choose from. It’s a competitive environment,” Shapiro added.

Competing prompted concepts that didn’t take off, such as Jay Mohr’s Tonight Show-style program Mohr Sports. Another—Pardon The Interruption—changed the entire complexion of cable TV sports programming.

The immediate success of PTI did not produce an instant tidal wave of the assorted knockoffs that make up most of the ESPN and ESPN2 non-event docket today, however. WWL brass had other concepts in the pipeline for the next few years, including jumping onto the reality TV craze of the early-aughts.

Beg, Borrow and Deal debuted in 2002, but not before ditching the originally-planned 2000s edgelord title Beg, Borrow and B.S. A retooled name didn’t make this attempt at a The Amazing Race-style reality show any better, though, and the series barely registered.

Any success ESPN had breaking into “reality” TV came unintentionally with the spring 2003 addition of the World Series of Poker into the network’s rotation.

Ventures into traditionally scripted content, meanwhile, also premiered around this time. Most notably, ESPN aired a pair of heavily promoted movies adapted from popular non-fiction books. These films—A Season on the Brink, based on John Feinstein’s dive into the tumultuous 1985-86 Indiana basketball campaign; and The Junction Boys, based on Jim Dent’s book covering “Bear” Bryant’s hellish training camp at Texas A&M—were the precursors to ESPN getting into fiction.