Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann reunite for ESPN's 40th anniversary: How they changed TV forever
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Saturday marks the 40th anniversary of ESPN's launch on Sept. 7, 1979. To celebrate, SportsCenter hosted a "Big Show" reunion of Patrick and Olbermann Friday night that allowed them to reflect on their signature moments, discuss getting older and depart with a Sopranos-style ending. "Ideas never have guarantees attached to them," ESPN historian James Andrew Miller tweeted of the reunion. "Bringing @KeithOlbermann & @dpshow together again could have turned out to be a grand sh*tshow. But tonight was beautifully played — in myriad ways. Congrats to all involved." As Bryan Curtis explains, Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann changed TV forever: "The voice they created while cohosting SportsCenter from 1992 to 1997 still ranks as one of the best and most miraculous things ESPN ever produced," says Curtis. "But I think we’ve been appreciating them too narrowly. On their self-titled 'Big Show,' Patrick and Olbermann took a low art form, doing highlights, and wrested it away from the howling Champ Kinds of local news. Patrick and Olbermann quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson and Monty Python and Johnny Most. They became one-name, Beatles-like categories. For a time, every wannabe sportscaster was a purring, FM-quality 'Dan' or a transgressive, scenery-chewing 'Keith.' Their voices were also bigger than that. In Patrick and Olbermann’s hands, SportsCenter was the best TV sportscast and, at the same time, exhilaratingly, the best parody of a TV sportscast. As Scott Van Pelt put it recently, Patrick and Olbermann mocked the thing they were doing and did the thing they were mocking, and were somehow the best at doing both. Today, the idea of news anchors giving viewers equal doses of news and satire might sound familiar. That’s because it’s the house style of TV. It’s not that John Oliver and Trevor Noah and every other disciple of Jon Stewart are doing Dan and Keith, exactly. But I’d argue Patrick and Olbermann anticipated the way news and comedy would merge. They refined a hyperliterate, funny, swaggering voice. And they made it cool as hell."
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TOPICS: ESPN, SportsCenter, Craig Kilborn, Dan Patrick, Keith Olbermann, Queen Latifah, Rich Eisen, Snoop Dogg, Marketing
