Before ESPN’s The Ocho, ‘Cheap Seats’ carried the flag for oddball sports

Another year of ESPN’s Ocho counter-programming wrapped up over the weekend, closing the books on a multi-day event where the network turns things over to Ultimate Frisbee, Corgi races, and the seemingly omnipresent Savannah Bananas.

It’s a celebration of off-the-wall sports, but for anyone who happened to tune into ESPN Classic 20 years ago, it’s also a reminder of a time when you could see those same bizarro sports accompanied by a constant stream of jokes courtesy of the late, lamented Cheap Seats.

Airing for four seasons on ESPN Classic — the last original episode ran in 2006 — Cheap Seats repurposed ESPN’s vast library of sporting events by adding a comedic spin. The jokes came courtesy of Randy and Jason Sklar — identical twins and stand-up comics — who hosted the show and provided a running commentary added over the archival footage. Sketches built around the featured sport and featuring what would become a who’s who of comedy — Zach Galifianakis, David Cross, Nick Kroll, Patton Oswalt and various alums from the sketch comedy series The State all dropped in on Cheap Seats — rounded out a typical episode.

And it turns out I’m not the only one whose thoughts turn to Cheap Seats whenever ESPN airs its Ocho programming.

“I would love it if there was kind of the Ocho desk,” Randy Sklar told me when I mentioned to him how ESPN’s programming this time of year made me think about the show he and his brother once hosted. “Like, who better to introduce the sports, talk to people from [an anchor desk], create an entire sort of home base for all the Ocho sports?”

It does sound like a match made in heaven if you watched any of the 77 episodes of Cheap Seats produced during the show’s four-year run. But even if the sight of roller hockey, paddle smash, pumpkin tossing and other events of dubious athletic quality doesn’t trigger Cheap Seats flashbacks, it’s worth revisiting the series if only to remind yourself of a program that cared very deeply about sports without taking itself too seriously.

Cheap Seats gets its start

The Cheap Seats origin story begins at the turn of the 21st Century when ESPN was pushing for original programming and turned to Gary Belsky, then editor-in-chief of ESPN The Magazine, for ideas. Along with Neil Fine, the magazine’s executive editor, Belsky came up with a pitch that would incorporate much of the programming from ESPN’s early days.

“I’m pretty sure the idea was to rip off — I mean, pay homage — to Mystery Science Theater 3,000,” Belsky told me via email. “Have a couple of interesting or funny hosts — or interesting and funny hosts — watch old ESPN Classic clips and riff on them. Hilarity and ratings would ensue. At least that was the theory.”

“Watch us watch the old games” is how Randy Sklar remembers the pitch.

Belsky’s involvement is how the Sklars came on board — he was the counselor at a camp the twins attended as 10-year-olds, and they’ve been friends ever since — though, to hear Randy and Jason tell it, they might not have been the first choices to host Cheap Seats. The Sklars, who already had an MTV series on their résumé, were catching up with Belsky over a meal in New York when he mentioned the idea behind the show.

“He’s explaining all this to us,” Randy Sklar said. “And he said, ‘So now all we need are two hosts who know a lot about sports and have great chemistry with each other.’ And then we just sat there, and he said, ‘Can you pass the ketchup?'”

“We’re like, ‘Gary!'” Jason Sklar added in mock exasperation.

“That story has become apocryphal,” Belsky noted when I emailed him about it. “But it has the advantage of being mostly if not completely true.”

There was still the matter of getting ESPN to sign off on the Sklars as hosts. The two brothers started coming up with sketch ideas to pitch at a meeting packed with network executives — Jason recalls about 80 people were there. Of the 100 ideas prepped for that meeting, Randy estimates that 40 made it onto Cheap Seats in one form or another.

“The Sklars came in to pitch ideas, and they just knocked the socks off of everyone in that follow-up meeting,” Belsky recalled. “It was far and away the greatest performance at a TV pitch meeting that I have ever attended, and I have attended at least … three?”

How Cheap Seats found its focus

In developing the show, there was some question as to what format Cheap Seats would follow. One idea was to have the hosts appear periodically throughout the show but otherwise not interrupt the old footage. But ultimately, the producers went with a format where the hosts commented on the footage as it aired — as Belsky noted, an approach perfected by Mystery Science Theater 3000. (In fact, nearly every person I talked to involving Cheap Seats cited MST3K as an influence — which makes sense, given the brief MST3K crossover in the Cheap Seats episode featuring the world creative breaking championship, a kind of karate exhibition gone horribly wrong.)

“You really have an opportunity to make great jokes over the action as it’s happening,” Randy Sklar said of the show’s format.

It also became clear early on to the show’s producers, writers and hosts what sports lent themselves to the Cheap Seats treatment. While you can find episodes built around more conventional events like the 1991 Rose Bowl, an Oilers-Red Wings game from 1979, or the 1982 Cal-Stanford game (you know, the one where the band becomes involved in the game-winning touchdown), Cheap Seats really found its footing when the games got a little whackier.

“In developing the show, we did look at actual games and do some, but they weren’t as well suited for making jokes,” said Todd Pellegrino, the show-runner for Cheap Seats. “We realized early on that the more contrived an event was and the more serious it was taken by everyone involved, the more potential for an episode.”

The production team certainly had plenty of material to choose from. Before ESPN became the sports monolith of today, the network spent many of its early years trying to find programming to air between SportsCenter installments. As noted in “Those Guys Have All the Fun” by James Andrew Miller and Tom Shales: “Except for a few rowdy NHL games and nightly SportsCenters, the ESPN programming that kicked off the network’s first full decade consisted mostly of random and eclectic events, many of which were pre-recorded and reaired.” And that left Cheap Seats with plenty of rodeos, spelling bees, and strongman competitions to make light of.

“We quickly realized that certain sports lent themselves better to commentary, like spelling bees,” Jason Sklar said. “You know, spelling bees are great because, first of all, it’s always fun to make fun of children. Also, there’s a lot of a lot of pauses in the action where the kid is thinking and there’s room for us to make comments and jokes.”

Those jokes could include a spelling bee contestant air typing words as she spelled them — something the Sklar Brothers would dub her “magic fingers.” Or it could be Al Michaels covering a wrist-wrestling championship on an old Wide World of Sports episode, as the Sklar Brothers imagine him mentally composing his resignation letter.

Sometimes, even the archival footage itself helped out with the gags. In that Cal-Stanford game from 1982, one of the writers noticed the graphics on the telecast put an apostrophe in the wrong place — instead of “Big Game ’82,” the graphic read “Big Game 82′.” It’s a seemingly small mistake, but that didn’t stop the Sklars from referring to the broadcast as “The Big Game 82 Feet” throughout the *Cheap Seats* episode.

“It really just came down to whatever idea felt funniest for whatever the footage was,” recalled Jon Glaser, who joined the Cheap Seats writing staff when the show briefly had a live studio audience and would later play memorable on-camera characters such as the Score Settler. “One of my favorite lines they came up with was for footage of ice motorcycle racing. During the race, there was some kind of hut in the middle of the track, and those guys sang one line of an ‘Our House’ by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young parody, ‘Ooooooour house. In the middle of a motorcycle ice track!’”

Memorable Cheap Seats moments

The Cheap Seats writing staff faced some challenges, particularly with what kind of jokes they could tell on Disney-owned ESPN. For example, Randy Sklar says the word “sucks” was forbidden by the network.

“Still, those restrictions turned out to work out in the show’s favor, the Sklars said. “It was actually a show that parents could watch with, like, teenage kids,” Randy Sklar said. “It was a show that they could watch together and not have to worry about content. And people come up to us and say, ‘I was never a sports fan. My dad was a sports fan,’ or ‘my mom was like the biggest sports fan ever. And this was the show that I watched with them.'”

Jason Sklar recalls that the goal with Cheap Seats was to do a comedy show first and foremost, not just a sports show with some jokes. The ambition was to take the same approach used at the well-regarded comedy shows of the time, with the Sklars citing Late Night with Conan O’Brien and The Daily Show as the standard they were shooting for.

“And that was our goal to make it, to try and create a comedy that would be considered in that same breath,” Jason Sklar said. “But also have enough sports in it that sports fans would watch it and say, ‘Okay, this is true to the sports as well. These aren’t people who don’t understand that.'”

The end result was some pretty memorable entries in the show’s 77-episode run. And while picking out favorites is “harder than picking a favorite child” according to Pellegrino, everyone seems to have an episode or two that stood out from the rest. For Pellegrino, it’s the episodes featuring replays of Superstars, ABC’s made-for-TV competition pitting athletes from the 1970s and 1980s against each other in events like swimming and the obstacle course; he’s also a fan of the episodes that covered Steve Garvey’s celebrity skiing and fishing competitions.

“I’m remembering that Garvey was also a fixture in the Superstars, so I guess anything that features Steve Garvey,” Pellegrino added.

Jason Sklar also enjoyed the Steve Garvey episodes, particularly because of the presence of a stand-up comic named Michael Floorwax, who became something of a comedic foil for the brothers. “And Floorwax was so gracious and great when we came on [his Denver radio show],” Jason Sklar said. “He acted like we were old buddies, and that we were just giving him, you know, roasting him the way you roast your friends.” In fact, Floorwax would wind up appearing in an episode of Cheap Seats in a bit where he wound up bankrolling the show with his gas card.

According to the Sklars, it wasn’t uncommon for people who found themselves on the receiving end of a Cheap Seats joke to join in on the laugh. In different episodes involving rodeo events, the Sklars did a Def Jam Poetry-style tribute to Pam Minick, the event’s color commentator.

“She wrote us and said she loved it,” Randy Sklar remembered.

People who’ve appeared on Cheap Seats aren’t the only ones to get in touch. Even 20 years later, fans of the show still let the Sklars know how much they enjoyed the riffs on off-the-wall sports.

“It’s not a week that goes by where people don’t say ‘Please bring back Cheap Seats,'” Randy Sklar said. “Whenever we do stand-up, a lot of people come up to us and say, ‘I love that show. I still watch like old episodes on YouTube.'”

Gary Belsky, who helped come up with the idea for the show, gets philosophical when asked when people still think back fondly on Cheap Seats. “What’s that old formula? Comedy equals Tragedy plus Time,” he said. “The tragedy here is that Cheap Seats isn’t still on ESPN. There’s something about Randy & Jason Sklar that says ‘average sports fan,’ — if the average sports fan was a twin and also very funny. They have a unique ability — well, not unique since there are two of them and unique means ‘one of a kind’ — but anyway, they have a unique ability to find what’s universally funny in most things, especially most sports things, and then amp up the humor and, not for nothing, the insight. I think that’s the secret ingredient.

“Their comedy isn’t just funny, it’s insightful,” Belsky added. “It gets at something that sticks with you, as a viewer, consciously or otherwise.”

And though it may have been 20 years since the show went off the air, there’s no shortage of sporting events popping up these days that would lend themselves to the Cheap Seats treatment. Pellegrino mentions this year’s Enhanced Games as a contender — “the apex of a contrived event and everyone involved taking it way too seriously,” he said — while the Sklars rattle off everything from car-jitus (it’s fighting, but inside of a car) to roofball.

“Once you develop that skill of just spotting something that would be good for that format, you can’t turn that off for the rest of your life,” Jason Sklar said.