SMW Q&A With Jack Kukoda

Sports Media Watch had a chance to speak with Onion SportsDome head writer and co-executive producer Jack Kukoda this past Thursday. Topics of conversation focused on the development of Onion SportsDome, how the show differs from The Daily Show, and whether some recognizable sports media personalities will appear on the show.

SMW: The Onion has done several sports-related videos over the years, as part of its online Onion News Network coverage. What went behind the decision to expand this from just a few online segments to a weekly, half-hour show?

Kukoda: It was sort of part of the natural evolution of The Onion. When we started doing the videos in the first place, almost four years ago, it started out as pretty straightforward newscasts. Then, we sort of expanded to do other shows, sort of panel-type shows, a morning show – and a sports network seemed like the logical next step from there. Then, it just sort of grew out of there, realizing it would be fun to do something on a bigger scale, where you could get to know the anchors a bit more, and do bigger stories that you could sort of return to over the course of 22 minutes, as opposed to just doing a short analysis piece. So it was just sort of a natural progression of, ‘oh, let’s keep trying to do more stuff and bigger stuff’ and that’s just how it kind of came about with Comedy Central.

SMW: Over the years, there have been so many rumors about doing sports versions of The Daily Show. Obviously, there’s some major differences [between the shows]. But do you think Onion SportsDome can be that long-rumored sports-version of The Daily Show?

Kukoda: The Daily Show is more taking real events in the news and in the world and then doing jokes about them and commenting on those. What The Onion does is all satirical, all made up stories. So the show’s a bit different – we’re not going to be commenting on games that just happened the day before or plays that just happened. The world of sports is just sort of a starting point for our stories and our creative material.

SMW: Is it difficult to be topical with this type of show? I believe the first two episodes, which will air on January 11 and January 18, I think those were done by mid-December.

Kukoda: We’ll be doing a mix of topical stuff and evergreen stuff. So we’ll definitely be commenting on relevant issues and topical issues, but it won’t be as much – The Daily Show is ‘Obama said this yesterday’ or ‘Congress did this’ – it’s things that are more evergreen, a bit broader in a sense. If you’ve seen some of the other videos we’ve done on the web, we still talk about real figures and real issues and the types of stories that come up a lot in the sports world, like steroid abuse and people wavering on retiring. Online, we have a video of a Packers fan who decides he’s going to come back to drinking for one more season, and just get drunk on his couch every weekend for another football season.

SMW: I noticed in the second episode specifically, a lot more of the evergreen type stuff. There were the two kid tennis players who were trying to escape from the court, the boxer who had the metal hands, things of that nature. Is that going to be the main aspect of the show, instead of maybe more stuff like – in the first episode you had all the Shaq heart attack jokes, things like that.

Kukoda: It’s really a mix; I think that’s just how those two episodes came together. We definitely want to aim for a mix of real life sports stuff and making fun of the world of fans, or youth sports, or fantasy sports. We don’t want to just be focusing on the major leagues, the major professional sports. So there will be real highlights, and more obscure highlights, and things that don’t really seem like sports at all that are covered in the highlights – like the meth hallucinations [league]. So it’s more like everything in the world of sports. We’re casting a really wide net.

SMW: Not to belabor the whole Daily Show point, but that show can often turn pretty serious, really address important issues. They had the 9/11 first responders episode a few weeks back. Obviously, your show is a lot more comedy based than The Daily Show, I’d imagine, since you’re not dealing with real headlines. But do you intend at some point to address some of the more serious issues in sports, even from a satirical bent?

Kukoda: Absolutely. The Onion’s never shied away from doing stuff that might be controversial or offensive or sort of risqué. So we definitely have stuff that touches on some of the more dark issues in sports. The hero worship that allows athletes to get away with crimes and awful things. In the first episode, we have the story about the retired NFL players who, basically, their brains are now mush and they can only see colors, and they’re almost like almost these sad, wounded animals. That’s one of the darker things, and pretty relevant what with all of the NFL cracking down on helmet-to-helmet hits, and the various reports and studies coming out about the long-term effects of contact sports on the brain over the years.

SMW: In one of the clips, I saw Ronde Barber as one of the personalities. And, correct me if I’m wrong, I thought I had seen Danyelle Sargent, who used to work for ESPN, also working as one of the correspondents. How many athletes, former news reporters, do you have working for the show?

Kukoda: The Ronde Barber clip was from the pilot, and yeah, that’s Danyelle Sargent as our Melissa Wells character. That’s one thing we’ve always tried to do at The Onion, is get people with real reporting backgrounds – people who’ve either worked in local news or in other national sports. We have two people on the show do NBC Sports stuff, and we have a number of real athletes – Ahmad Bradshaw; in the first episode, Paul Lo Duca; Gary Payton serves as our NBA analyst later on in the season. One of our biggest things – aside from the first goal, to be funny – is to be as authentic and true to the style we’re trying to recreate as possible. So getting those real people, and people who sound like reporters and have experience as anchors, or reporting sports, or analyzing sports, or former professional athletes, fits in with that. So there will be definitely more down the line, throughout the series.

SMW: I noticed in the first episode, one of the SportsDome co-anchors returned from suspension, and that was a running joke throughout the episode. I’m guessing that’s kind of a dig at ESPN’s various personnel issues over the years, even up to what happened with Ron Franklin this past week.

Kukoda: Not necessarily specifically ESPN, but yeah, probably pretty specifically ESPN. But the larger sort of sports media culture in general – the Jets this year, and a lot of other places. Some of the athletes and guys try to get away with things, or do get away with things, and it sometimes serves as a macho environment. That’s definitely what that joke is. That was a long way of saying, yes, that’s who that joke was aimed at.

SMW: Is the show going to focus mostly on taking on – you mentioned athletes earlier who try to get away with stuff, media who tries to get away with stuff – is it going to be mostly like that? Are you going to be taking some new perspectives on this type of stuff, maybe even going after fans who happen to be too critical or things of that nature? Or is it going to be more of the conventional type of criticism? Because everyone likes to criticize the media and criticize athletes.

Kukoda: No, no, the long-term goal is hopefully to replace ESPN, SportsCenter in general (laughs). But we don’t want to just criticize the media or certain athletes. There’s plenty to make fun of. We, who wrote the show, we’re all sports fans, and there’s plenty of stuff to make fun of that we do. The obsessive nature of fans – the Pujols story in episode one, where the fans are basically willing to let him do anything to them as long as he stays in St. Louis. We want the show to be funny, first of all, but not just reinforcing criticism that’s already out there. As much as possible, we want to make the joke funny and incisive, but in a way that you haven’t heard before. Or a criticism that you haven’t heard before. So I think as the series progresses, you’ll see that we have quite a few targets, and it’s going to go a lot of different places, and make fun of fans and also some of the tired criticisms you hear about sports. It’s certainly not looking to just bash sports.