Tonight at 11 PM, Keith Olbermann returns to the nightly TV beat, with a new show on ESPN2. It also marks a return to ESPN and the world of sports for Olbermann, who has spent the better part of 10 years in the world of politics at MSNBC and Current TV.
According to James Andrew Miller in the NY Times, he doesn’t seem inclined to go back.
“No, I won’t miss politics,” he said. “My understanding of my own emotions relative to politics was really clarified in the past year. I was invited on ‘This Week With George Stephanopoulos.’ I did it twice, and they invited me on many more times. We talked about doing it on a regular basis, but I found myself coming up with really bad excuses to not do it, like my dog needs my attention. I finally figured out I just didn’t like the subject matter anymore.
Advertisement“If you cover politics for eight years without interruption like I did, you need a change,” he said. “After all, we retire our presidents after eight years. Why you should make anybody cover our political system beyond that is a mystery to me. It was pretty much burned out of me.”
The new show will feature the “Word Person in the World” segment (with a focus on sports, obviously), and will open with a long monologue from Olbermann rapping together the day’s sports news. There will also be a segment where they replay clips of Olbermann from his first run at ESPN in the mid-90s.