Even when The Onion was just a scruffy free weekly found in Madison, Wis., vestibules, its conceit was that it was the centerpiece of a big media empire.
Is it a coincidence that this is becoming true? Or — cue portentous music — is it destiny?
The Chicago-based comedy conglomerate moves into a new medium this month with not one, but two, new television series sending up TV conventions as vigorously as the original print product sends up newspapers.
Tuesday on Comedy Central sees the premiere of “Onion SportsDome,” a parody of ESPN’s SportsCenter in which one of the blustery anchors is just back from suspension and a top story features young tennis prodigies who keep trying to run away during a match only to be forced back onto the court by their parents.
And on Jan. 21, IFC debuts “Onion News Network,” a parody, more or less, of CNN, but with 100 percent less Wolf Blitzer. The slogan is “News Without Mercy,” and, in stories such as the one eviscerating a “viewer” who sent in a correction of ONN “reporting,” or the one about how profoundly a snowstorm has affected “the nation’s idiots,” it delivers.
The shows are logical extensions of the satirical publication’s online video efforts, begun in 2007 and recipients of multiple Webby Awards, for best online material.
Onion.com Web traffic has more than doubled, the company says, to some 7.5 million unique visitors per month since the addition of ONN, also the name for the Web-based collection of twice-weekly short videos. And even before appearing on TV, ONN’s online efforts have already won a Peabody, the medal usually bestowed on radio and television that ennobles the human spirit.
The series each have 10-episode runs, with options to be renewed, and feel like the right place for Onion to go now, says Steve Hannah, the former traditional newspaperman who runs the Onion’s business operations out of a River North office. (Full disclosure: In a business partnership begun during the summer, Chicago Tribune Media Group handles ad sales, printing and distribution for the Chicago print edition of The Onion.)
“We’re trying to take the Onion comedic brand and to translate it into video as we did first on the Web, and to take it to a large audience and to make people smarter as a result,” says Hannah, the company’s CEO and a true believer in the power of satire. “I think our brand is great comedy, but I think it’s really smart comedy.”
In planning the plunge into television, Onion had in mind the track record of past humor giants such as Mad magazine, National Lampoon and Spy magazine. “All these comedy brands seem to have sort of a half-life,” Hannah says, and he wondered why they didn’t last longer.
One answer came during a chance meeting with a former National Lampoon publisher at a New York party some years back. “He said, ‘Are you the guy who is the publisher of the Onion?’ I said I was,” recalls Hannah. “He said, ‘You want some advice?’ He said, ‘You have to constantly reinvent. You can’t rest on your laurels.’ He said, ‘No. 2, you really have to protect your brand. You can’t put your brand over all sorts of things.'”
“The Onion Movie,” released straight to video in 2008 with little fanfare and after a long incubation period, is a case in point. It’s co-written by former Onion newspaper editor-in-chief Robert D. Siegel, who went on to write “The Wrestler,” but it was produced in Hollywood beginning in 2003 and is wildly uneven.
By 2007, an Onion executive told Variety the Onion was “no longer associated” with the film.
So while Onion has had approaches from and meetings with TV people over the years, nothing felt right until Comedy Central and IFC came knocking. “SportsDome” and “Onion News Network” are produced in-house, in New York, headquarters for the Onion News Network Web video team and comedy writers whom Hannah calls “the beating heart of the organization.”
“It’s so exciting to be in a position to do it on a larger scale, to do it for real,” says J.J. Adler, director and co-executive producer of the “Onion News Network” TV show.
Adler is one of a batch of Columbia University film students the company hired when it first decided to make the investment in online video, figuring that was a good way to get smart and fresh-thinking people at a relatively low cost, Hannah says. Adler and her cohorts cut their teeth on the Web videos and now are running the full shows, along with production staffers who were added as the shows were being made.
“This is a really great intersection of two compelling things for us,” says Kent Alterman, Comedy Central’s head of original programming and development. “Doing a comedy show in the sports world is a natural. There’s no show like it around. And to be in business with The Onion, they’re one of the sharpest satirical forces in our culture.”
His channel was confident working with this first-time producer because its Web videos are executed at a high level, he says, adding: “It’s so clear so quickly that their attention to detail is so intense. They’re so true to the vernacular.”
While there is an old theater maxim about satirical shows closing quickly, Onion and its TV partners are counting on the Web, video and print-product fan base to tune in — and on the fact that you don’t need to please all of the people, or even a tiny fraction of them, to be a success on cable.
A few million viewers, and you’re doing just fine. And “SportsDome” will have the benefit of premiering at 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, right after the third-season premiere of “Tosh.0,” Comedy Central’s Web-video highlight show, and right before the powerhouse 10 p.m. bloc of “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.”
The Comedy Central Web site this week graciously tossed in a promo for the other Onion show: “But don’t forget there’s also ‘Onion News Network,’ debuting over on IFC later this month,” it said, “presumably sandwiched between a Whit Stillman marathon and a collection of short films about menstruation.”
OK, maybe not wholly graciously. But the joke actually highlights a point: IFC has been moving away from its indie film roots (Independent Film Channel is no longer the name) toward a cutting-edge comedy orientation.
Both Onion shows instantly nail the atmospherics: A little-known fact is that ONN on the Web has actually used real CNN studios for its backdrops. In the TV shows, the graphics, the over-aggressive promos and the screen crawls bursting with distracting information are all dead-on.
But what really clicks are the actors playing the lead anchors and the material they’re given. On “ONN,” it’s Brooke Alvarez (Suzanne Sena, a former reporter/
anchor for Dallas local news, E! and Fox News) who is horrified at how bad a kidnapped ONN reporter looks in a hostage video and whose official bio lists her “longstanding feuds with both Wolf Blitzer and Yo Yo Ma.”
On “SportsDome,” it’s Mark Shepard (Matt Oberg) and the more alpha Alex Reiser (Matt Walton), the latter back from a suspension about which the show keeps dropping hints.
One toss to commercial break sees the company’s HR person approaching the news desk to talk to Reiser.
The meat, though, is the news parody itself. (The material for the TV shows is all new, although Onion does have the right to repurpose segments onto the Web.) For “SportsDome,” a bit about Dwyane Wade and LeBron James rewriting basketball rules for their own benefit goes too far, breaking the thin wall between exaggeration and preposterousness.
But the runaway tennis phenoms segment is perfect, and a couple of pieces sending up sports features — about a handicapped mixed martial arts fighter who faces discrimination because of his (deadly) robotic hands, and a young Phillies fan with cancer whose dream is to curse out a Mets player at a game — bring to mind the pre-taped feature pieces that have long been a “Daily Show” highlight.
On “ONN,” favorite standing Web features such as the simpering morning show parody “Today Now!” also make the transition. In one early episode, the “Today Now!” anchors reduce a girl rescued from a fire to tears by trying to get her to pledge to be as valuable to society as the fireman who died saving her.
The great thing about the news-parody format is that fresh bits come along so quickly that even one that doesn’t work for you will be over soon enough. With such rapid-fire material, The Onion is hoping to lengthen the half-life of its comedy empire.
And from there? “Even before we launched ONN (on the Web), I remember we said, ‘If this thing works out, the next sort of logical extension of it will be television,'” Hannah says.
So if TV works out?
“Can I see us going to the movies eventually? Of course.”
‘Onion SportsDome’
9:30 p.m. Tuesday, Comedy Central
‘Onion News Network’
9 p.m. Jan. 21, IFC
