Media Monster

Sports Shows On Comedy Central Don’t Work

Less than a year after launching two separate sports shows, Comedy Central has announced that it’s pulling the plug on both of them, canceling both Onion SportsDome and Sports Show with Norm Macdonald.

The canceling of Sports Show is sad, but not entirely surprising. It delivered some nice moments, like Macdonald disgusing himself as Blake Griffin and the show-closing “garbage time,” which featured Norm firing off as many jokes as he could in under a minute. Sports Show, however, didn’t deliver the viewers, as its last episode had just under a million of them.

Onion SportsDome, meanwhile, premiered with 1.5 million viewers, but the show was met with mixed reviews and was ultimately hindered by not filming live, thus not allowing it to instantly react to the most recent news in sports. We’ll miss it for its occasional shots at ESPN.

The lack of success for sports shows on Comedy Central is disheartening, especially when you consider that it has found success in two political-comedy shows in The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. (The show replacing Sports Show and SportsDome in its vacant timeslot, Jon Benjamin Has a Van, premiered last Tuesday to 1.16 million viewers.) These shows are driven, largely, by the otherworldly talent of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, but the fact that neither SportsDome or Sports Show got any traction at all means that their cancellations may have more to do with the audience than with the talent.

Perhaps Comedy Central’s next sports feature should adopt the four-nights-a-week format that Colbert and Stewart use, or maybe it would benefit from a Wednesday night spot with the always popular South Park as its lead-in (Workaholics, which currently occupies that spot, just got picked up for its second season).

Or, perhaps, sports just doesn’t work on Comedy Central. This time, at least, it didn’t.

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