Not only fun, games

The young lady with the heavy Boston North Shore accent smiled stiffly, rearranging her Red Sox jersey as she sat on the couch. Next to her, inching slightly away and slapping his thighs nervously was her boyfriend, a Long Islander decked out in a Yankees shirt.

Less nervous on the other couch was Dawn Yanek, who writes a column called “Sex Spy” for Stuff magazine, a publication designed mostly for young men who slap their thighs nervously and deck themselves out in Yankees shirts. Yanek’s job this particular morning was to advise the two on how they could cope with their possibly volatile baseball allegiances and still have a romance.

This may be ESPN, but it ain’t your daddy’s “SportsCenter.”

Relationships, food, music, news you can use -- that is what ESPN2’s “Cold Pizza,” the network’s 4-6 a.m. chat show is about. The show runs weekdays, starting Monday. ESPN was built on guys who slap their thighs nervously and deck themselves out in Yankees shirts, to be sure, but taken for granted was that those folks only wanted highlights, scoreboards, live and taped games and maybe the occasional cheerleader cutaway shot. Now ESPN is thinking that those guys want something else as well, something that the “feminized” TV world away from sports won’t provide them. As Yanek’s presence suggests, some of the inspiration for the show, as it is for much of ESPN2, is with the cheeky, snarky “lad” magazines like Maxim or FHM.

“We’re doing this with a real male focus, which makes sense because all the other morning shows are female-oriented,” said Jim Cohen, ESPN’s vice president for programming and production. “Our viewers don’t have a morning show and, if you look at places like Men’s Fitness and Men’s Health magazines, you know they want more about relationships and health and all that.”

ESPN is joining Spike TV and Comedy Central’s “The Man Show” in a strange new mini-trend in television, of stations that serve the needs of men, who, it turns out, haven’t had programming of their own. Surely, many women, who’ve had to endure as their husbands hoarded the remote control to watch stations like, well, ESPN, would beg to differ. But ESPN executives have decided games are not enough.

While on the one hand, ESPN is spending more and more on big-time sports rights -- the National Football League, World Cup Soccer, three of the four tennis Grand Slam events, college basketball and football -- it has also veered into entertainment in a bigger way. The network aired two made-for-TV movies in the last year -- one about basketball coach Bobby Knight, the other about football coaching legend Bear Bryant. It has hired and let go Rush Limbaugh as a football commentator. It has a new dramatic series, “Playmakers,” a rough-life drama about professional football. At least two of its commentary shows -- “Pardon the Interruption” and “Around the Horn” -- tend toward the boisterous, often at the expense of the actual sporting events.

“The whole thing is rather interesting. That ‘E’ in ESPN stood for entertainment, which they never have dealt with, so now they are clearly trying to broaden their horizons,” said Steven Miller, a professor in the Rutgers University communication department who teaches about the television business. “If you look at ‘Playmakers,’ it doesn’t deal with football games, but it is as if sensationalist television has invaded the world of sports.

“Now, if you look closely, they hyped things up on ‘Sports Center,’ ” he said. “They hyped their graphics and play up clips of fights and the like. They had outdoors shows before, but never with Deion Sanders, a flashy football guy. Now a morning show. It is all entertainment, but is this the way ESPN is supposed to be?”

Well, perhaps, if you ask Mark Shapiro, ESPN’s executive vice president for programming and production, who is the gatekeeper for all ideas about what gets aired on the network.

“We do want to experiment, to bring in a broader group of people,” said Shapiro, a high-energy detail-oriented guy. He weighed in during one “Cold Pizza” rehearsal, for instance, on how many times host Jay Crawford should hear time cues and precisely how the “Cold Pizza” on-air logo should angle on the screen.

“The movies and ‘Playmakers’ show that ESPN will be successful in reaching other than the hard-core sports fan. We have a challenge to do something outside of games,” he said. “We have not even pulled the covers off what ESPN can do.”

Going after female fans

For one thing, despite the male-orientation of “Cold Pizza,” there is no escaping the feeling that the show is targeted as much at an audience not yet fully tapped by ESPN: women. “In the last five years, in particular, the National Football League has powerfully realized the market power of women professionals who are sports fans and is marketing much more aggressively to them,” said Victoria Johnson, an assistant professor of history at UC Irvine, who specializes in TV and film. “The power of the female sports fan dollar is growing, and ESPN has really begun to capitalize upon this.”

“ ‘Playmakers’ is able to capture both audiences well -- engaging younger male audiences through hip-hop scoring and exciting on-field action,” she said. “The presumptively female audience is attracted -- again, presumptively, according to TV programming conventions -- to the more melodramatic narrative aspects of the show.”

The experiment to put Limbaugh, who resigned after comments he made claiming the media goes easy on black quarterbacks, on “NFL Countdown” as well as the decision to air “Playmakers” have garnered ESPN criticism from its presumptive TV partner, the National Football League itself.

Owners, players and coaches have been critical of “Playmakers” because it shows the fictional players using drugs, womanizing and exhibiting violent behavior. Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie was among the most virulent in his criticism of ESPN.

“The issue is not Rush Limbaugh. The issue is how we’ve come to hire Rush Limbaugh, and how we’ve come to portray athletes,” he said after Limbaugh criticized his quarterback, Donovan McNabb. “Showcasing NFL players purportedly doing cocaine at halftime in ‘Playmakers.’ Nothing could be further from the truth.”

But Shapiro isn’t apologizing for taking the channel in new directions. “Things like ‘Cold Pizza’ shore up the schedule outside of the news, information and games,” Shapiro said. Part of the reason for doing the entertainment shows is defensive. In case the network loses or gets outbid for rights to events, it will still have substantial programming to put on.

“Cold Pizza” itself looks fairly lightweight, if somewhat fun. Its main anchors are Jay Crawford, a former sports anchor in Tampa, Fla., and Kit Hoover, one of the first women on MTV’s “Road Rules” and most recently a Fox News Channel correspondent. Leslie Maxie, a former Olympic hurdler who comes from Fox Sports, is the news anchor, and Thea Andrews, who plays a sports reporter on “Playmakers,” is a real one on “Cold Pizza.” The show’s name should be familiar to anyone under 30.

“It evokes college to me,” said Shapiro. “You order pizza at night and there it is in the morning for you to eat, with little fuss. We think it will help our core young audience to relate.”

Morning TV guru Steve Friedman, who was an executive producer on “Today” and the CBS “Early Show” and helped launch NBC’s “Dateline,” is consulting producer for “Cold Pizza.”

“There are some rules about morning TV that I’ve learned,” he said. “First, try to be up and be topical. Second, try to make the audience laugh a little bit. Waking up is hard to do. Third, give them something to talk about at the office around the water cooler. Fourth, give them something to use in their daily life. Do all those and do it attractively and you have it.”

Friedman said that when he was doing “Today,” nearly 20 years ago, the audience was half women and half men. The morning shows now lean decidedly toward the female audience, and he is happy to think he is helping ESPN attract that other half that has strayed from morning TV. “There is a lot of room to get the male audience. ESPN is a good place to be right now because it is trying something different all around the schedule. ESPN, HBO and, maybe, NBC are the only places around doing anything exciting,” he said. “It’s great to be extending the legacy of [original ‘Today’ anchor] Dave Garroway. This is going to last a long time. Twenty-five years from now, I’ll be able to say I worked on the first ‘Cold Pizza.’ ”

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‘Cold Pizza’

Where: ESPN2

When: Weekdays, 4-6 a.m., repeated 6-8 a.m.

Hosts...Jay Crawford, Kit Hoover.

Reporters...Leslie Maxie,

Thea Andrews