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In the interest of full disclosure, I should admit something: I didn’t make it. After three days of watching, I simply couldn’t subject myself to the “entertainment’ of ESPN Hollywood any longer. Let me make this as clear as I possibly can: it’s bad. So bad that not even the attractiveness of Thea Andrews can make up for it. It’s worse than corporate schlock: it’s ESPN pretending to produce Entertainment Tonight. I knew this going in, but somehow it exceeded my worst fears. Save yourself. Don’t ever watch it. Thank me later.

Now that that's out of the way, we can talk about the show that at least pretends to be a news program – Cold Pizza. For those unaware, the show started in the fall of 2003 as ESPN2’s attempt to garner some semblance of ratings against SportsCenter’s morning broadcasts. For the first month the show was on, I watched it religiously. I like to refer to this month of my life as “the month I was unemployed and had nothing better to do.”

Though most of the show’s original hosts (including the aforementioned Ms. Andrews) have been replaced by more reputable sports journalists, the main focus of the show is to be what SportsCenter is not – a clone of other morning shows, like Today and Good Morning, America. This creates a strange brew indeed … and one that doesn’t always work with sports.

The show’s main segment, “1st and 10”, relies on the Odd Couple-esque relationship between two experienced sports writers, Woody Paige and Skip Bayless. I’m going to call them Skippy and The Wood, in part because it’s no less ridiculous than their real names, and in part because it makes me think of (the much funnier) Pinky and The Brain. The Wood, already familiar to ESPN’s audience from his appearances on Around the Horn, shows himself to be absolutely insane. His signature move involves donning a white wig and soft doctoral cap, calling himself “Professor Screwloose”, and saying nothing that makes a lick of sense.

But that’s better than Skippy, who seems dedicated to pissing off the entire viewing audience by vociferously defending opinions which, amazingly, seem to disagree with everyone else simultaneously. I’d try to make a joke here, but Cracked Magazine (a favorite of BTF’s youth) handled it two weeks ago in their fake ESPN.com gag.

This might actually work if these clowns were managed by an effective moderator. As it is, they're stuck with Jay Crawford, a well-meaning but out-gunned studio anchor from Tampa. As I watched, the results weren't always pretty.

The Three Stooges managed to get a few things right when they stopped trying to entertain and simply spoke as fans. With all the week’s news regarding steroids in baseball, the old guys actually did a nice job of explaining why fans care about the potential drug abuse. On top of that, each day would end with a fan-friendly debate between the two, ranging from the true order of the BCS teams to the relative significance of Ali and Nicholas. These were fun to watch, and showed that sports journalists have the same debates that fans have over the water cooler.

For the most part, though, these positive moments were drowned out by the rest of their segments. The arguments between Skippy and The Wood are anything but fact-based. The Wood gets the stats wrong, Skippy ignores them all together, and most of the ten daily topics devolve into petty arguments between the two writers. Little was worse than watching the two discuss the T.O. situation; you were more likely to find dignified journalistic insight on an elementary school playground. And that's the bottom line: in an attempt to make two old sportswriters more entertaining, the show drastically and consistently misses its mark.

The low-water mark for “1st and 10” was reached on Friday, when they traveled to Tuscaloosa in a poor-man’s version of College GameDay. On its face, it's another effort by Bristol to co-opt the success of one show onto another; as I noted last week, it's not like ESPN hasn't used that tactic before (see: PTI and ATH). But this pathetic stooping was another example of the show abandoning journalism in favor of showbiz schtick. In the week I watched, the show featured interviews with Run DMC’s Rev Run, country star Dierks Bentley, and...[shiver]…Carrot Top (for the record, Carrot Top is really jacked…scarily so…but still not funny).

Worst of all, though, were the plugs.  Sorta-journalist John Feinstein came on to pimp his new book, Next Man Up...though in Bristol's defense, Feinstein doesn't work for them, and Simmons blasted the book only a day later. Far less acceptable was an interview with Rodney Carrington, star of ABC’s “hit” comedy Rodney. Maybe Rodney really is doing great business, though the ratings would seem to disagree -- nevertheless, the Cold Pizza stunt struck me as little more than ABC-Disney cross promotion.

So, in the midst of all of this entertainment and rhetoric, does Cold Pizza actually cover any news? Well … sort of. Anchor Dana Jacobson led a solid walkthrough of the ESPN: The Magazine expose on baseball’s steroids problem. A regular Wednesday feature, "Diagnosis NFL", brings on a sports medicine specialist to explain recent NFL injuries, adding context to the standard injury wire reports.  Also, each day included a five-minute human interest interview with a Winter Olympics athlete in the show’s “Countdown to Torino.” Given that Cold Pizza seems to be the only outlet that recognizes that the Winter Olympiad is less than three months away(besides broadcaster NBC, that is), these features were welcome - if somewhat fluffy - additions to the sports diet.

These featurettes aside, the majority of news on the show is presented in three-minute “headline” segments, with the news of the day voiced by "contributors", generally in-house analysts with a few prominent print columnists. Even with top-level analysts for each sport, like  Buster Olney and Pat Forde, the "headlines" sound like they are merely echoes of the same thirty seceonds that just played on SportsCenter. And that only covers the “big” sports stories: the show didn’t take advantage of its opportunity to provide commentary on less sexy (but more important) news stories, such as Kim Ng’s consideration for the Dodgers’ GM position or the scoreboard fiasco in Sacremento. It was disappointing that the producers of the show aimed their news to the same demographic which watches SportsCenter, when simple format changes would not only garner new viewers, but also broaden ESPN’s television presentation of the sports world.

In a sense, though, this isn’t all that surprising. Television is distinct from the print media a number of ways – the depth of its analysis probably being the largest of them. The difference in thoughtful commentary on CNN and in the Washington Post doesn’t surprise anyone, even if we aren’t happy about it. Maybe that’s why Cold Pizza includes one additional segment with Skippy and The Wood where they present their favorite headlines and sports columns from newspapers around the country. I guess even ESPN is telling us that if we want more thoughtful consideration, we should look for the usual suspects. But since we know they aren’t getting it done either … that just makes Cold Pizza’s failure to take up the mantle of serious sports analysis all the more disappointing.

So, am I worse off for the experience?  Nah; Cold Pizza certainly has worthwhile points. But does Cold Pizza pass the test of "good" semi-sports media?  I'm not so sure. If ESPN is looking for a more viable alternative to SportsCenter, they still have work to do.  In the meantime, your search for commentary and analysis with the proper mix of humor should keep you online.