Find an event
Sports off-center
A team of local comics skewers the world of ESPN-style sports journalism, and ends up with its own nationally syndicated TV show.
If you’re staring blankly at your TV just past midnight on a Sunday night, tired of stale ESPN highlights or reruns of Weekend at Bernie’s II, here’s a piece of advice: Turn on NBC. There, on Sports Action Team, you might see a red-faced Mike Ditka kicking ass at Pictionary, then smuggling food from his own restaurant for a Thanksgiving dinner. Or you’ll see Oakland Raiders safety Stuart Schweigert toilet-papering his neighbor’s house.
These are just some of the shenanigans to be found on Team, a mostly improvised show that features local comedians—and big-name athletes—yukking it up. Filmed at a Streeterville studio, the show follows a fictional sports broadcast and plays out like a cross between SportsCenter, Waiting for Guffman and The Real World—a mix of celebrity segments, sideline skits and solo confessionals. The setup is inherently ripe, comedically speaking: “Sports anchors, by nature, are low-status guys who think they’re really, really high status,” says Kevin Fleming, who does double duty as an actor and a codirector (with Al Samuels). As such, we see characters with overinflated egos bicker about technical slipups, online girlfriends and why one character’s stint in a defunct football league (anyone remember the USFL?) is not very impressive.
The “news team” consists of two anchors (Fleming and Samuels); two correspondents (Antoine McKay and Katie Nahnsen); one overbearing producer (Niki Lindgren); and, of course, the hapless intern (Steven Fleming), Kevin’s onscreen (and real-life) brother. Pro athletes are also given a rare chance to flaunt their comedic side, often getting in on the jokes. One episode featured Oakland Raider wide receiver Randy Moss answering every question with a shameless plug for his Inta Juice line of smoothies, even when a frustrated reporter, at wit’s end, asks Moss, “What’s the best nonjuice-related thing that’s ever happened to you?”
Episodes are pieced together with little scripting—a huge show of faith on the part of the network. But the actors are slowly finding themselves with more creative liberty. “In the beginning, we’d film for eight hours and they’d use two minutes,” Samuels says. “Now, more of what we film is in the episode. Even words we never thought they’d air are getting in.”
Originally slated to run on NBC affiliates in Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco, the show has made its way to Chicago; New York; Washington, D.C.; and elsewhere—33 markets in total. The show’s celebrity roster has also steadily expanded, as has the athletes’ willingness to appear foolish. This week, Bears safety Ricky Manning Jr. films a promo for Team’s “Get Kids Involved” campaign. When no kids show up, the intern decides to create one via computer-generated imagery. So Manning gamely tries—with cringe-inducingly awkward results—to interact with a nonexistent child. And ’85 Bears linebacker Otis Wilson appears in a barbershop quartet, singing the words ice cream way off-key. It may seem surreal, but Wilson says, “I’ve been doing these kinds of things since 1980, so when they asked me to be in the quartet, I was fine with it. Nothing seems too crazy anymore.”
The show began when Mike Schmiedeler, an exec with Towers Productions, a Chicago-based production company, saw Samuels perform at Second City. Schmiedeler asked him to do an affordable, improv-based concept for NBC’s post–Sunday football slot. Samuels was skeptical: “People are always asking me things like, ‘Any ideas for a toaster who tells kids not to talk to internet predators?’ and 99 percent of the time, [the projects] don’t go anywhere,” Samuels says. “Schmiedeler was also working on some Patrick Swayze thing, which, surprise, didn’t take off. It wasn’t helping his case.”
But Team stuck around (NBC bought an entire 17-episode season, which concludes January 1), and its success has affected more than just the cast. For small roles, the cast simply pulls from the immense Chicago improv talent pool. “Every time we bring someone on, the producers pull us aside and say, ‘Where did you get this guy?’?” Samuels says. “We’re like, ‘Well, there’s tons of talent here in Chicago.’?”
So will there be an influx of Chicago-based TV pilots and other groups putting up similar skits on YouTube (where you can catch up on old Sports Action Team episodes)? Lindgren, who’s a member of Second City’s e.t.c. revue Disposable Nation, has high hopes. “Maybe no one’s watching, but this is yet another thing Chicago improvisers are doing,” she says. “We’re out to prove there are other avenues to recognition than Second City.”
Sports Action Team airs on NBC Sunday nights at (roughly) 12:15am. Manning Jr. and Wilson blitz the screen Sunday 10.
