After sixteen years and several stops along the way, Keith Olbermann has officially returned to ESPN.
ESPN announced Wednesday that Olbermann will anchor a one-hour late night talk show on ESPN2 starting August 26. The show will be titled “Olbermann” and air usually at 11:00 PM ET, though the start can be moved back due to live sporting events.
The “Olbermann” show will include “commentary, interviews, contributors, panel discussions and highlights,” and is expected to complement the 11:00 PM ET “SportsCenter” on ESPN. In contrast to a New York Times report, ESPN president John Skipper said during a Wednesday news conference that Olbermann will be able to talk politics on the show as long as it is related to sports.
For now, Olbermann will concentrate for now on getting his show up and running, a source told Sports Media Watch Wednesday. In the future, however, he may contribute to other ESPN platforms and programs.
It was not clear whether one of those programs would be “SportsCenter” — though that would seem unlikely, considering Olbermann’s distaste for Bristol, CT. The Big Lead reported Wednesday that Skipper is planning to have Olbermann host a week of “SportsCenter” episodes August 19, the first full week of the new Fox Sports 1 channel.
Olbermann’s return to ESPN once seemed rather unlikely. ESPN VP/Communications Mike Soltys famously said in 2001 that Olbermann had not just burned bridges at the network, “he napalmed them” (Sherman Report, 7/17).
After several other acrimonious exits — including a departure from Current TV that ended in a lawsuit — Olbermann began pursuing a return to ESPN last year. The New York Times reported in March that Olbermann had dinner with ESPN president John Skipper, and though Skipper was frankly dismissive of Olbermann in that article, The Big Lead reported shortly after that ESPN was interested in his return.
ESPN reportedly spent more than a year deliberating whether to bring Olbermann back to the fold (NYT, 7/17). In addition to his terrible falling out with ESPN in 1990s, another complicating factor was his polarizing reputation as a cable news host.
Olbermann will go from having been largely absent from television over the past year to being nearly ubiquitous by October. In addition to his ESPN2 show, Olbermann will also anchor studio coverage of the Major League Baseball postseason on Turner Sports. It is unclear how Olbermann will balance his nightly program and daily studio show coverage in October.
(Wed. news from ESPN Media Zone; additional info from SI.com, The Big Lead)
