Curious Hair wrote:
Yeah, I tried to give it a shot this week, but it is, like you said, objectively bad. The show doesn't feel fun. It feels indulgent. Dan and Terry went up their own asses all the time, usually about NBA stuff that no one else gives a shit about, but they'd eventually get back on course because either Dan had the radio discipline to stop sperging out over who was in the top 20 for steals from 1999-2003 or Terry proved too ill-informed to do anything but just riff. One way or another, Terry did generally keep things grounded in the idea that this -- sports, sports radio, whatever -- is all a fundamentally stupid waste of time. I don't think that's the case with Dan and Jason. Now sports is a necessary battleground for the culture war. And be that as it may, I don't think either one makes a good general for it. Dan, despite his persistent misconception that he is black, is a dumpy middle-aged rich guy in a gated community who makes six figures to scold people about LeBron James. The only #resistance he knows is wrinkle-resistant fabric. Jason can believably talk culture-war stuff, but it's not his strong suit, which is simply being a likable sports nerd you'd want to hang out and talk Chicago sports with. They're terrible interviewers, yes, but so were Dan and Terry, and they've had a lot of terrible guests.
Basically, the show is just going to be combing Deadspin every morning for race relations and NBA minutiae and then yelling at callers. I don't know where the levity is going to come from, other than Jason randomly giggling at things.
But it doesn't matter. None of it matters. They carry the defending world champion Chicago Cubs. That alone will put them ahead of everyone in the market but 780 and maybe V103. They could fire everyone and just have Julie DiCaro bitching for 12 hours a day about the time someone bumped into her shoulder on a train platform and they'd still kill the books.
Right, and one nice wrinkle the station gets that is unique to being the Cubs flagship is they will spend a lot of the summer having their mediocre afternoon show preempted by games. The two will be free to blithely babble about anything on the airwaves and still pull in massive numbers just from people who leave the station on after Cubs post.
But the day is going to come when Goff leads right into a show after a Cubs game saying things about white people that will not go over well with the Cubs fanbase. Dan knows better than to piss off the blue meal tickets, but Apron and Cub. Jason either doesn't know or doesn't care, probably a bit of both. There is also the fact that the Ricketts are on the Wrong Side of History and people will start taking more notice of that once the season starts. They can evade callers and guests who will bring that up, but they cant evade the cohost who decides that today is the day he puts Cubs ownership on blast.
It'll be the best show they ever broadcast, too bad I'll completely uninterested in listening by the time it hppens.