Judging from the commercials I saw, I was really looking forward to watching “Onion Sportsdome” yesterday after Tosh.0. The clip of Rodney Harrison not knowing he was playing football made the rounds a week or two ago, and I thought it was really solid and kept me laughing. Judging by overall reaction, however, it seems that I was in the minority when I said I enjoyed the style of humor and the show in general.
The first story on “Sportsdome” was about the Miami Heat’s Big Three (LeBron, Dwyane Wade, and Chris Bosh) changing the rules of basketball to make them more awesome. I found it absolutely hilarious and was pleased to find out later that on their site, they added articles to complement the segments they have on the show, which is really helpful considering the incredibly fast pace “Sportsdome” has in just half an hour, peppering rapid fire jokes that can be missed. When I was looking online, I’m pretty sure I saw clips of everything that was on the show, which is great for replaying to show friends or just to catch the jokes you didn’t hear or see again. I also found this hilarious scan of the Big Three’s new rules, which is worth looking at. Stuff on the bottom of the screen during the story like “New rules highlight offense by making defense illegal,” and “Chris Bosh allowed to cry on court if he wants to” were hilarious and what I expected from The Onion for a show like this.
To elaborate more on what I expected, let me first say this. I was on Twitter while watching this show, and I found that the reaction was really mixed, with more people leaning towards hating it than liking it. Out of the people I follow around Twitter (about 100), everyone who tweeted about it hated it. How’s that for terrible sample sizes?
I feel like when I was watching “Sportsdome,” it was exactly what I expected out of The Onion making a sports show, regardless of what the quality was. I really love their site, and I used to subscribe to “The Onion News Network” podcasts on iTunes, which were very similar to what they did on “Sportsdome.” It’s not supposed to be like “The Daily Show” in that it takes down dumb athletes like Ben Roethlisberger in real stuff he does. The point of “Sportsdome” is to create exaggerated stories that make the people (in this case, athletes) in them look like caricatures because the story is so over the top. I’m not trying to be a snob or anything (farts into chai), but you either get the humor of “Sportsdome” or you don’t. It’s not for everyone.
While most of the episode was good, I have no clue what that last segment was. I think it was about Alex Rodriguez making a musical or some shit? I got really lost in that quickly. Besides that though, I thought the episode was really solid, and so did another certain guy who used to work for ESPN. No, I’m not talking about Steve Phillips. Why the hell would you guess Steve Phillips? Does he even have a Twitter account?
