Bill Simmons to host Grantland-branded show for ESPN
Grantland, ESPN's digital outlet that focuses on sports, entertainment and pop culture, and the intersections therein, will get its own branded TV series on ESPN, "The Grantland Basketball Show," the network said Tuesday.
Grantland founder Bill Simmons will host the show, joined by a rotating panel of commentators and contributors, starting Oct. 21 at 8 p.m. ESPN will air as many as 18 one-hour episodes this season, including specials tied to the N.B.A. playoffs and draft.
ESPN is calling the program "the first Grantland-branded television series," implying that more may follow, marking a significant expansion of the digital franchise, which launched in 2011.
In March of this year, ESPN bundled Grantland, FiveThirtyEight and ESPN Films, into a new unit, Exit 31. The division combined the brands' resources, which are outside of the bread and butter sports coverage of ESPN, and also served to find ways to more effectively monetize them beyond digital display advertising.
Turning Grantland and FiveThirtyEight into TV and film franchises could be an effective way to do that.
“It really is about figuring out how to bring these other talents and other disciplines to bear on ESPN, and even ABC News a little bit through our FiveThirtyEight relationship with them,” Marie Donoghue, ESPN's senior V.P. of global strategy, business development and business affairs, and the executive in charge of Exit 31, told Capital at the time. “We will look for the best, most effective way to tell the stories, and not necessarily be governed by which platform we are working on.”
While "The Grantland Basketball Show" may be the first original program to come from Exit 31, it does not sound like it will be the last.