For over two decades, Pardon the Interruption has remained one of ESPN’s most popular sports debate shows. As for why this is, Meadowlark Media’s Pablo Torre and MSNBC’s Chris Hayes believe that it was due to the show’s first-of-its-kind format and layout at the time of its inception.
On Tuesday, Hayes joined Torre on his podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out, to discuss various topics around both traditional media and social media and how people’s appetite when it comes to consuming media has changed.
One of which was how newer forms of media such as TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts are undoubtedly shortening the attention spans of viewers and making long-form pieces of media much less desirable.
Pardon the Interruption seemingly got ahead of this trend from the very start. For years, Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser have covered the vast majority of hard-hitting topics from the day before by discussing them in short segments with a rundown on the side of the screen so viewers knew what would be covered next.
Pablo Torre brought up PTI when discussing how quick-hitting content came to be in sports media before any other show was able to do so at the time.
“The Fall of 2001 is when modern cable television learned what it needed to optimize itself,” said Torre. “It’s the breaking news alerts, the scroll on the (bottom of the screen). Which every sports fan knows. Of course, cable and political news embraced it fully. By the way, the other suspect in this murder mystery of what happened to our attention. I think PTI is in there.”
Hayes wholeheartedly agreed with Torre’s assessment, saying it was “so well-engineered” in part due to the rundown of the topics being discussed throughout the show on the right side of the screen.
“Oh yeah, PTI is so well-engineered,” said Hayes. “They put the rundown on the screen. The thing that is brilliant about putting the rundown on screen is it’s like the signs on the subway that tell you how long the train is going to be. PTI is one of the brilliantly engineered formats.”
“And the clock,” added Torre. “This was October 2001 by the way. It anticipates the short attention span. The desire for what is next. It anticipates the infinite scroll. Before every other show on TV.”
What perhaps makes Pardon the Interruption such a great product is that while many shows followed their format of quick-hitting topics and a show rundown for viewers at home, very few have been able to grab viewers’ attention with the kind of longevity as Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser have.
Even Around the Horn, which has aired immediately before Pardon the Interruption on ESPN since 2002, is reportedly set to be canceled in the summer of 2025.
Pardon the Interruption always has been and likely always will be a successful show, which is likely why ESPN brasses said last year that PTI will remain on ESPN networks “for the foreseeable future”.
