‘Any Given Wednesday’ May Be Beyond Repair, But HBO Has Another Option

UPDATE (11/4/16): HBO has cancelled the underperforming Any Given Wednesday, according to the Hollywood Reporter. In a statement, Bill Simmons said “We loved making [the show], but unfortunately it never resonated with audiences like we hoped.” HBO said Simmons will continue to develop new projects for the network.

Hosting a TV talk show is a tough gig.

Stephen Colbert was arguably the best in the business when he left Comedy Central’s The Colbert Report to take over CBS’s The Late Show, and it wasn’t an easy transition. Colbert’s Late Show had trouble finding a cadence, his ratings suffered, he changed showrunners, etc., and it took a good six months to figure out what the show wanted to be.

Seth Meyers has had an even longer evolution in his nearly three years as host of NBC’s Late Night. It wasn’t until his second year that he shifted his opening monolog to a news-anchor bit, which he perfected as host of SNL’s Weekend Update, segment and shifting his focus and guest mix more toward public affairs.

Talk shows take time to find themselves, but I’m not as optimistic that HBO’s Any Given Wednesday will turn the corner.

Former wise-cracking ESPN personality and 30 for 30 documentary series creator Bill Simmons launched the HBO talk show in late June as a weekly look at the worlds of sports and culture. His guests on the first episode were Charles Barkley and Ben Affleck, and the dozen or so episodes since have been a mashup of everything from a commentary on Jeff Probst as an underrated reality show host to interviews with with NFL players and Friends of Bill (Simmons).

It isn’t working.

The show’s tone is quick, smart and comedic. There’s a sheen of erudition, but it’s often annoyingly, insufferably bro-y — like an Ivy League sports bar with too many regulars. If you listen to The Bill Simmons Podcast, you’ll already recognize Any Given Wednesday guests like former White House speechwriter Jon Favreau, journalist Malcolm Gladwell and actor Michael Rapaport.

On a recent Any Given Wednesday episode, Rapaport — already his second guest appearance on a show that had only done a dozen episodes — cracked jokes about Tiger Woods smiling ear to ear in a photo with model Paulina Gretzky. Rapaport referred to Woods as “a world-class cocksman,” laughed at his own joke, and then called actor Matt Dillon “a cocksman” too because, well, just because. If the Bill Simmons Podcast isn’t filling your weekly requirement for that brand of witty repartee, you can find more on Any Given Wednesday.

That clubby familiarity is a problem. Aside from a few early gets like Mark Cuban and Aaron Rodgers, there’s little to distinguish Simmons’s HBO show from his podcast beyond the fact that the latter is audio (and free).

Timeliness is also a problem. Daily talk/news shows are a grind, but they’re also immediate and responsive. You watch watch Good Morning America or Morning Joe or Pardon the Interruption to get the latest news with some enlightenment from hosts and guests whose opinions and analysis you trust. It’s fine if you miss today’s show because the news is always changing and there’s another episode tomorrow.

There’s little to distinguish Any Given Wednesday from a dozen other ad-libbing, fast-talking sports talk shows on ESPN, Fox Sports, talk radio and podcasts. And most of those — like the Tony Kornheiser Podcast and ESPN’s Mike and Mike — are doing five shows a week, responding to yesterday’s big trade or last night’s big game.

Weekly shows are different, or at least they should be. They have to be appointment viewing. They have to be special. You watch Meet the Press because Chuck Todd is ahead of the curve and gets the best guests. You watch Last Week Tonight because John Oliver cuts through the bullshit of the news and hosts one of the funniest half-hours on TV.

You watch Any Given Wednesday because, uh, you like the Bill Simmons Podcast? Simmons isn’t high-profile enough or insightful enough to break through a crowded news/talk marketplace, and the show isn’t distinctive enough for a network that prides itself — “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.” — on standing out creatively. Like Netflix’s Chelsea, which actually does three episodes a week, HBO’s Any Given Wednesday is in that mushy space between a weekly show that isn’t special and a daily show that isn’t current, and there isn’t much of a market for that.

The network late-night hosts — Fallon, Kimmel, Colbert, Meyers and Corden — draw about 11 million combined viewers a night. On cable, the biggest draws are weekly hosts Bill Maher (1.7 million) and John Oliver (1.3 million) on HBO and Samantha Bee (1 million) on TBS. Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah does around 800,000 a night, and TBS’s Conan O’Brien about 500,000.

HBO took a sizable gamble on Bill Simmons and Any Given Wednesday — a reported $20 million over three year — and the ratings from his first dozen episodes are not paying off. The show has averaged 318,000 viewers per episode including DVR and on-demand through the first seven days after a new episode airs, according to ratings data provided by Nielsen, and has lost one-third of its premiere-night audience. It’s not one of the 100 most-watched cable shows on Wednesday nights, and it has outperformed its lead-in movie only twice. The last two episodes, according to ratings data, had fewer than 200,000 viewers each. 

Simmons has a smaller audience than Larry Wilmore had — about 350,000 viewers — when Comedy Central cancelled his Nightly Show in August. (Incidentally, this week’s guests on Any Given Wednesday: hockey great Wayne Gretzky, comedian Bill Burr and former talk show host Larry Wilmore. At least Simmons and Wilmore will have something to talk about.) The Simmons-produced After the Thrones recap companion to Game of Thrones was also a dud, averaging only 210,000 same-day viewers during its 10-episode run this year.

HBO hired Bill Simmons for the same reasons it hired John Oliver — to build an audience with street cred, social-media buzz and a can’t-miss talk show. Oliver has crushed it since the beginning; Simmons has not. Any Given Wednesday has already done quite a bit of tinkering to no effect, and the show has become a drag on both Simmons’s and HBO’s reputations. (Google “Any Given Wednesday,” and you’ll see what I mean.)

As HBO turns its attention to fine-tuning Vice News Tonight and developing high-engagement digital content like Jon Stewart’s forthcoming animated series, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see the network wind down Any Given Wednesday at the end of this year and either transition Simmons to making documentary films or cut him loose.

But here’s a better idea: Given that Simmons’s current show is essentially sports talk radio posing as a prime time interview show, a daily sports talk show on HBO NOW might be just the thing for HBO and Simmons.

Any Given Wednesday, though, may be beyond repair.

[Where to stream Any Given Wednesday]

Scott Porch writes about the streaming-media industry for Decider and is also a contributing writer for Playboy and Signature. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.