Well, that was…interesting

So I watched the Onion SportsDome last night. Meh.

Michael Hale of The New York Times said it best in his review yesterday:

Some of these segments are quite amusing, but they’re rarely more amusing than they would have been if published in The Onion (the newspaper or the Web site). You get the sense that the writers are running the asylum. For the most part, the transition to television consists of little more than actors, and the occasional sports celebrity, reciting Onion jokes.

It’s funny to think of the mayor of St. Louis’s giving the home-run hitter Albert Pujols the skeleton key to the entire city — “Our homes, our cars, our Internet access, our showers and whatever’s in our fridge. All of it is yours, Albert” — but hearing it read by an anonymous actor is probably less funny than reading it yourself would have been.

Having watches SportsCenter-type programs for a long time, I must say I’m not getting that much out of OSD. Sure the segments are wildly exaggerated (Or are they? Hmm.) But having the announcers talk faster and louder than the figures they’re representing just seems, I don’t know, kind of boring.The only piece I liked was the “Miami Heat makes the rules” skit.

Hale writes

The best segment, and the most brutal satire of “SportsCenter” and of turbocharged sportscasting in general, is a barking-pundits face-off called “Who Would You Kill?” Zeroing in on the harsh judgmentalism that cross-pollinates the Internet and sports television, it poses the question of who should be killed for a team’s failings.

Maybe I’m still a tad sensitive over the Giffords shooting — and I understand we as a society have a very short attention span/memory — but this just seemed inappropriate. And yes, I’ve been a fan of The Onion for a long time and understand that this is their type of humor.

NPR’s “Monkey See” blog posted this

There are two challenges this show is going to face in the longer term. The first is that SportsCenter already has a little bit of a sense of humor about itself, in a way that straight news (as mocked in The Onion classic) doesn’t. The anchors are meant to be using somewhat silly hyperbole, and being amusingly bombastic; that’s part of the shtick. That means that perfectly copying their mannerisms sometimes just looks like SportsCenter itself, rather than a parody of SportsCenter, even during what are supposed to be the funny parts.

The other issue is more substantive. If The Onion has a weakness, it’s having a great headline followed by a story that consists of a bunch of different ways of saying the same joke that’s in the headline. For that reason, I often don’t actually read the entire story just because there’s a great headline. I see the headline; I move on.

With video content, it’s much more linear. You have the anchors shout the idea, but then the audience has to watch the entire story, for as long as it lasts. If you run out of jokes and keep repeating the basic premise over and over, you risk having people wish they could essentially get to the next joke rather than hearing a two-minute version of a five-second headline.

Oh, well, I’m not going to get too excised over it. The programs is only on for 10 episodes.