It’s just been six episodes and Anthony Jeselnick and Gregg Rosenthal have already been censored by the NFL, having an entire show scrapped by the powers that be. In what we do get this week, Jeselnik and Rosenthal explain what happened, that it could happen again, and that they (and the NFL) knew what they were getting into when they came up with the idea for the show.
Posted by Adam Greene on Saturday, December 5, 2015
I’m not a big podcast listener outside of This American Life or Radiolab and before you think I’m sitting here in a cloud of my own pretentious farts, the main reason I don’t is because I watch tons of TV and play video games. In fact, writing this is the only reason I’m not currently exploring the wasteland in Fallout 4 at this minute. Since I bought that game, pretty much everything in my life is just a break from playing it. I’ve kind of got a problem.
Regardless of that, Jeselnik would seem like an odd choice to be hired for an NFL podcast with the NFL’s Gregg Rosenthal, but they’re actually friends from college and lived together when they were in college. Now Jeselnik has had a rough couple of years. His show on Comedy Central got cancelled after two seasons and his ex girlfriend, Amy Shumer, has become the most famous comedian on the planet. A podcast might seem like a rotten consolation prize if you don’t count getting puked on during oral sex on an episode of Garfunkle and Oats. The IMDB page is a little light is what I’m saying.
But Jeselnik is funny and probably one of the best comedians working today and certainly not a guy that works well in the corporate-controlled world. He butted heads with Comedy Central during his show (and that’s probably why it got cancelled) pretty much from the first episode on. He’s unapologetic in his material and that’s not someone who usually can work for Disney-fied media.
Rosenthal is the actual commentator with the bonafides. He runs Around the NFL for NFL.com and has a lot more to lose when it comes to battling it out with the NFL’s content censors. But both guys seem to take the censoring in stride. And there’s no reason to believe that Jeselnick won’t spill what the problem was on twitter or in a special down the line like he did with the Comedy Central problems.
You can get caught up on their past episodes that weren’t banned on their webpage or on iTunes. The show will be back next week and might even air.
“We maybe flew a little too close to the sun…” Rosenthal said. “…It’s a miracle and I can’t believe we’ve been able to do any of these… It’s not like they’re cancelling the show, it’s just that we can’t let you do that…”
I really want to know what the hell they did.
