Katie Nolan, the Emmy-winning host of FS1’s canceled Garbage Time, is being wooed (wooed is a great word) by ESPN, according to a Sporting News story. The story states she has an exclusive contract with Fox Sports through September of next year, but that hasn’t prevented potential wooing, according to the story about wooing.
The report makes this all seem very daytime soap opera, as backstabbing and revenge and jealousy on the part of ESPN is playing a part in this.
Stealing Nolan away from FS1 would also be payback against Jamie Horowitz, the ex-ESPN wunderkind who’s recruited a basketball team worth of former Bristol talent to the upstart FS1, including Skip Bayless, Jason Whitlock, Colin Cowherd, Cris Carter and Chris Broussard.
Horowitz has high hopes for Nolan, treating her like the network’s brightest young star. The Los Angeles-based FS1 is developing a variety of new show formats that would increase her on-air presence “five-fold,” sources said last week.
With the cancellation of “Fox Sports Live” with Jay Onrait and Dan O’Toole, and the end of her once-a-week late night “Garbage Time,” the decks are clear for Nolan to launch her own weekday, late-night show at 11 p.m.
First of all, “revenge” for hiring that cavalcade of doofuses for way too much money? Is it possible ESPN is holding these meetings to thank Horowitz. “Katie, hey, we don’t have Jamie’s new number but you can tell him we are very appreciative of what he’s done for us here, giving us a chance to use Michael Smith and Jemele Hill more prominently?”
Second of all, increasing someone’s work “five-fold” when they’re already under contract? She better be getting a raise if the contract was for “one-fold” worth of work. Instead of giving her five more jobs, why not invest five times as much into the one show people liked that won an Emmy despite rarely airing at the same time every week because a video game battle or college game ran long?
Third of all, am I the only one who wishes a non-sports network would hire Nolan? Like, when Comedy Central had its 11:30 p.m. slot open with the cancellation of The Nightly Show, why couldn’t something be worked out there to make Garbage Time daily on a network that wouldn’t handcuff her in terms of the jokes? Imagine working in sports jokes and the people at your network deserve like 80 percent of your jokes but you work with them? It would be like having The Colbert Report air on Fox News.
There’s enough trash in the sports world for the show to run four days a week but alas, it never happened. Garbage Time had real potential to be a sports version of The Daily Show. Relegating a very funny sports person to reading tweets at halftime of the Super Bowl or co-hosting a sports talk radio show with Mike Greenberg and Mike Golic seems like a waste of talent, but what do I know?
The story also floats the idea of her getting a show that airs daily from 6 a.m. to 9:30 a.m., and there’s nothing crueler than asking a comedian to wake up that early every day.
But hey, wooing is good, as long as there is five times as much money for giving someone five times as much work.
