Kenny Mayne believes ‘Mayne Street’ was ahead of its time

Before Aubrey Plaza was in anything, before Ben Schwartz was anyone, and before John Mulaney had a Netflix special or a late-night show or a reputation as one of the best stand-ups working, all three of them showed up in a little ESPN web series that Kenny Mayne built in 2008 that the world wasn’t quite ready for.

Mayne made an appearance on the Awful Announcing Podcast with Brandon Contes this week and spent a good stretch of the conversation on Mayne Street, the short-lived scripted comedy he developed with collaborators Josh Shelov and Todd Pellegrino, which lived on ESPN.com at a time when the people inside Bristol weren’t exactly evangelists for the internet.

“I remember when I first got to ESPN,” Mayne told Contes. “We used to make fun of the internet people, like, ‘hey, you guys have fun on the computer over there, we’ll be reading the Newark Ledger over here.'”

That attitude had shifted enough by 2008 that then-ESPN president John Skipper was willing to let Mayne and his collaborators find out if the idea worked. The show got real critical traction and built genuine momentum before ESPN pulled the plug without ever giving Mayne a satisfying explanation for why. Mayne’s theory, nearly two decades later, is that it was simply too strange a fit for what ESPN.com was at the time. There was no mechanism to take something niche and give it the kind of reach that might have turned a critical success into a cultural one. Had Mayne Street launched five years later, the conversation about what it became might look entirely different.

“I think had there been the ESPN app and all the social stuff and the way to export it,” Mayne admitted, “it might have had a better chance.”

The casting process turned out to be one of the more inadvertently consequential things Mayne has ever been involved in. Plaza originally auditioned for the producer role that ultimately went to Becker, but she made enough of an impression that Mayne and the producers simply invented a new character to keep her in the show — an executive who, as Mayne put it, played the role “in a very funny and mean way.” Schwartz played the hotshot young network executive. Mulaney appeared in one episode during a stretch of his career when he was still just a face in a room, contributing nothing particularly memorable and leaving no particular impression at the time.

“He wasn’t John Mulaney yet, you know,” Mayne told Contes.

A good chunk of them ended up on Parks and Recreation not long after, and Mayne — still anchoring SportsCenter back in Bristol — watched from a distance as the cast he’d assembled went on to become the people they are today. He’s stayed close with most of them. Schwartz and Mayne were exchanging notes just days before the AA podcast appearance. Jon Glazer, who played the cameraman Video Cowboy, is still very much active in the industry. So is Becker. And Mayne still holds out hope that Plaza credits Mayne Street somewhere in her eventual awards acceptance speech.

“She had better,” he quipped.

The show’s first episode, called “Fixes,” was built around a segment of the late-night SportsCenter experience that Mayne walked Contes through in detail on the podcast. Whoever anchors the last show of the night has to go back and re-record any factual errors before the broadcast re-airs the following morning — a wrong stat, a botched name, anything that slipped through — and in the episode, Mayne keeps mangling Rafael Nadal’s name take after take while Scott Van Pelt, playing himself, tries to hold the broadcast together while his marriage quietly falls apart around him.

It was exactly the kind of specific, self-aware humor that made Mayne one of the more distinct voices SportsCenter ever had.

Mayne Street may have come and gone without the recognition it deserved, but Mayne himself has hardly been idle in the years since. He left the network in 2021 after 27 years, calling himself a “salary cap casualty” after rejecting a reported 61 percent pay cut, and has since said he’s largely at peace with the decision. His Wiffle Ball documentary — a 30-minute film exploring his claim to have thrown a Wiffle ball faster than Ken Griffey Jr. at a Pacific Science Center exhibit in 1989 — brought him back to SportsCenter briefly last November for the first time since his departure. Mayne Street has stayed with him through it all, and he revealed that he hasn’t ruled out coming back to it in some form.

“I think I’m too mid-famous at this point,” he said. “I need somebody more famous to make this thing get off the ground.”

Given the careers that were launched from that show, he might not have to look too far.