TV Week In Review: Showtime, HBO, JGR and Haiti

What a week of NASCAR TV news! Since we will all be watching sports car and NASCAR racing this weekend, the TDP week in review is up one day early.

We begin with recap of the changes coming to NASCAR TV this season. Kyle Petty in and Jimmy Spencer out at SPEED for RaceDay and Victory Lane. Michael Waltrip in and Kyle Petty out at Showtime for the new Inside NASCAR series. Click here to read all the details...

One tidbit added after that article was that Shannon Spake will be filling various roles for ESPN in addition to pit reporting. This includes hosting NASCAR Now, reporting stories for that show and offering content for SportsCenter and other ESPN programs. Veteran fans may remember Spake as hosting various shows for SPEED prior to her switch to ESPN.

This week TDP caved to the pressure and opened a fan page on Facebook. It turned out to be a blast! Currently, we have links up to view Jimmie Johnson's first HBO show online, pics of the new Nationwide Series cars and even a raging debate about the new Hooters sponsorship on SPEED. Click here to stop by!

SPEED entered the second week of the new Race Hub show even as NASCAR was still cracking down on what it called "negative reporting." Located right in NASCAR's backyard, SPEED is walking into a whole new challenge reporting weekday news on Monday through Thursday. Click here for an overview of those challenges.

From out of the blue, NASCAR used its own Media Group in partnership with SPEED to produce a moving and emotional Haiti Earthquake Relief special. Rick Allen, Michael Waltrip and Jamie McMurray hosted a program that used footage from many sources including Hendrick Motorsports. The result was fantastic.

Also working quite well was the first of a four episode special series on SPEED called JGR's Countdown to Daytona. Instead of dramatic hype, the program took a realistic look at the company as it moved toward the first race of the season. Footage from all kinds of sources blended well to produce a balanced hour show. Click here to read about the Haiti special and the JGR program.

Leave it to HBO to come out of the gate at full speed. The first episode of the four 24/7 programs featuring Jimmie Johnson aired on Wednesday. It treated Johnson as a millionaire professional athlete. It made no bones about what he does and why he does it. Ultimately, it put a very new and modern face on the sport at just the right time. Click here to see the episode online for free and leave a comment.

To wrap-up the week, our friends at Showtime dropped a little bomb. Fans had been advised that the Inside NASCAR series would be available for viewing online and via cell phone. We were told this by NASCAR's own TV folks. In discussing the specifics with Showtime, they were quite clear in saying as far as they were concerned, fans needed to subscribe to Showtime to see the program.

Showtime only has about 17 million subscribers, so perhaps letting the other 75 million cable homes see the show either with ads or for a nominal fee might be a good idea. Click here for a little review of the online bomb falling.

You can leave a comment at the bottom of any link by clicking on the comments button on that post. Please feel free to leave your comments on any of these topics right here as well. Thanks for taking Friday to look back so we can all finally watch some live racing this weekend. The TV schedule is on the right hand side of the main page. Thanks for stopping by!

Tuesday TV Notes

The weekend featured a stellar TV special produced by an extraordinary amount of cooperation between many parties. NASCAR, SPEED, Hendrick Motorsports and others contributed interviews, footage and information to make SPEED's Haiti Earthquake Relief Special come together.

Rick Allen, Michael Waltrip and Jamie McMurray provided the studio portions. Allen set the right tone for the program and both McMurray and Waltrip contributed the NASCAR presence. Before the taping, McMurray took the photo above. The mix of content, information on donating to the Red Cross and limited commercial elements worked like a charm.

The special first aired on Sunday night up against the live NFL playoff game. On Monday night, it was scheduled to re-air at 8PM but someone at SPEED's network operations center did not get the message. After thirty minutes of Super Cars Exposed, the special did air completely beginning at 8:30PM.

For those of you who may have missed it, SPEED will be re-airing it again at 8AM ET on Tuesday morning. That's a good opportunity to record it for later viewing or to keep for a while. That one is going to be good to watch again. It's a great reality check.

The first JGR Countdown to Daytona program aired Sunday and proved to be a well-produced show offering the kind of casual behind-the-scenes content that perhaps the sport needs a lot more of this season. The highlight was JD Gibbs leading cameras on a walk through the JGR facility. There are three more of these one-hour programs to go. TDP has the complete NASCAR TV schedule on the right side of our main page.

Race Hub returned on Monday after an ill-timed absence last week right in the heart of the Charlotte Media Tour. Rick Allen and Randy Pemberton led guests Larry McReynolds and Jamie Reynolds through some polite talk about preseason topics.

McMurray is proving to be a thoughtful presence on TV. McReynolds is cleary accentuating the postives of everything happening in the sport as the build-up to Daytona begins. He has clearly chosen the cheerleader role so far this season.

SPEED toned down the new Monday Race Hub sponsor this week. Hooeters used to be a longtime friend to the sport. Last week, the hosts said "Hooters, it's more than a mouthful Monday" several times with big Hooters logos adorned on the set. No pun intended. This time, the off-camera voice-over announcer handled the sponsorship and the commercials that ran luckily contained more cheeseburgers than cheesecake.

Finally, HBO is set to air the first of four episodes of its 24/7 documentary series that focuses on Jimmie Johnson and his preparation for Daytona. Tuesday at 10PM the premium service rolls-out the first thirty minute show. It should be interesting to see what is included in the final product.

HBO is in about 38 million US homes serving primarily people who are entertainment oriented. Cable nets like SPEED, TNT and ESPN are more than double HBO's size. HBO Sports has been around for a very long time, but that division cancelled Inside the NFL a while back, which is how it got on Showtime. How many folks tune-in to see a documentary about a NASCAR driver on HBO should be interesting to find out.

One last note. The annual Toyota All-Star Showdown from Irwindale, CA will be the first taste of live NASCAR racing on Friday and Saturday night at 10PM ET. This is a wild event with NASCAR regional series all-stars combined with some "ringers." There are Late Models, Super Late Models and Camping World regional classes. Over 125 cars have been entered for this year's races.

Please feel free to offer your comments on any of the topics mentioned above. To add your opinion, just click on the comments button below. This is a family-friendly website, please keep that in mind when posting. Thank you for taking the time to stop by The Daly Planet.

SPEED's New Challenge: NASCAR News

Monday, we start the NASCAR TV news season for real. SPEED has one week of Race Hub before ESPN's NASCAR Now joins the mix on Monday, February 1st. This year, fans will have the choice of two TV news programs every Monday through Thursday.

ESPN has a three year jump on NASCAR news. SPEED steadfastly refused to offer any TV news during the week, opting instead to focus on the weekend activity at the tracks. Adding Race Hub late last year on the fly showed both the best and worst results of jumping into the deep end of the NASCAR TV news pool.

So far this season, everything on Race Hub has been polite, scripted and planned. In other words, the actual racing has not yet started. The PR releases have been orderly, the smiles have been easy and Mike Helton was the featured guest on the show last week.

As with any professional sport, there are a myriad of issues and stories that the Race Hub producers can choose to feature or discard. Over the past three seasons, NASCAR Now has taken topics like Jeremy Mayfield's drug suspension, Goodyear's tire failures and the COT woes head-on without blinking.

Click here for an article discussing the subject some in the media are concerned about. Despite the claims of letting the drivers police themselves this season and that rubbing is just racing, NASCAR has stepped-up efforts to blame the media for problems within the sport.

They told drivers in closed meetings that expressions of emotion and frustration on NASCAR topics were bad for the sport. Specifically pointed out that the drivers and their public statements reported by the media were directly affecting the TV ratings. In other words, despite the social media outreach and the Fan Council mentions, NASCAR is putting the clamps on free speech.

Click here for the TDP column on Jack Roush and his recent rant against the NASCAR TV partners. He pointed directly to Darrell Waltrip and Rusty Wallace as each having a personal ax to grind on the air.

Into this delightful atmosphere walks SPEED with a brand new TV series featuring NASCAR news directly from the personalities who make it. That was a key reason the network rolled out Race Hub from the North Charlotte, NC studios. Suddenly, anyone and everyone who was in the news could take a short drive and be on national TV in the evening hours speaking to NASCAR fans directly.

SPEED's on-air track record in dealing with hard news stories is anything but stellar. Monday night's TWIN purposefully focused on highlights and refrained from reporting news. The network offered no other weekday NASCAR shows until the practice and qualifying coverage started from the tracks on Fridays.

In 2009, it was sometimes ironic that the best NASCAR news coverage was offered by The SPEED Report, a show intended to cover all forms of motorsports on Sunday nights. Meanwhile, programs from NASCAR Live to RaceDay routinely avoided hard news in favor of race preview information.

One factor in whether or not Race Hub gets credible is the host. SPEED has decided to rotate its current crop of on-air talent through this assignment rather than designate a fulltime person for the position. While names like Krista Voda and Randy Pemberton are used to dealing with news, announcers like Rick Allen and John Roberts are more in tune to directing on-air traffic.

This is a big shift of gears for SPEED. The network has not done a daily NASCAR news program in a very long time. The challenge is to see past the NASCAR edict and dive into the reality of the sport regardless of whether it might be viewed as positive or negative. Studio guests should face real questions and offer more than the PR spin on an issue.

So, after a short trial run last season and some polite conversation this year, Race Hub faces the challenge of establishing itself as a credible source of NASCAR news for the fans. Rick Allen and Randy Pemberton co-host on Monday and we'll be watching.

TDP wants your comments on this topic. To add your opinion, just click on the comments button below. This is a family-friendly website, please keep that in mind when posting. Thanks for taking the time to stop by The Daly Planet.