Watch: Fans immediately noticed 1 major mistake in TBS' selection show
It says something about college basketball that the big March Madness selection show got moved from CBS to TBS, no doubt because an executive thought the audience was no longer there to justify network television for it.
But if you’re going to move a show to cable, it at least behooves you not to cheap out on the production values.
Yet someone at Turner made a mistake so elementary that it no doubt landed him a stern talking-to from the boss when audiences mercilessly savaged it on social media.
If you watched the show, you already know what we’re talking about here; the audio and video were about two seconds out of sync, creating the kind of effect normally seen in schlocky 1970s movies from Japan.
First off, credit to Greg Gumbel for selling the move to Turner’s studios where “Inside the NBA” is produced as “Atlanta, because this is just a beautiful place to be this time of year.” Nice save, Greg.
But where the video really shines is when Ernie Johnson throws it to a shot of the audience, clapping and cheering — and the silence is golden. Comedy gold, that is.
Two seconds later, the cheers come up, rising like a phoenix from the uncanny valley.
The reaction was swift — and Twitter was just a beautiful place to be this time of year:
Nailed the audio, TBS. #SelectionShow pic.twitter.com/VCj8axwyGs
— McNeil (@Reflog_18) March 11, 2018
Insightful fans pointed out that perhaps doing the show in an NBA studio was a bit incongruous with a collegiate pace of play:
https://twitter.com/TheBenSwain/status/972955879220957186
Timothy Burke at Deadspin pointed out the most likely reason for the screw-up: Because the show had a live audience, TBS took the natural precaution of putting the audio on a delay, the better to catch any accidental curse words or other bits of won’t-someone-think-of-the-children TV gaffes, but they forgot to put the video on the same time shift:
Selection show added a delay to the audio (because of the live audience!?) but forgot to delay the video along with it
— Timothy Burke (@bubbaprog) March 11, 2018
Arizona State beat writer Brad Denny picked up on the rather “Enter the Dragon” nature of the error:
So the Selection Show moved to TBS and became a bad king fu movie
— Brad Denny (@BDenny29) March 11, 2018
The selection show is one of those pieces of TV fluff that ultimately amounts to two minutes of news and two hours of talking-head commentary. If, say, a Nevada alum wanted to know that his team was the No. 7 seed in the South region, he didn’t need to watch TBS for two hours to find that out; he could’ve switched to the Pacers-Celtics game.
Therefore, it becomes imperative that producing the selection show goes off without a hitch, because otherwise you’ll commit the greatest sin in television:
No way I can watch this if the audio is off the entire time. #SelectionShow
— Mike Gillespie (@MikeAGillespie) March 11, 2018
TBS lost the audience. Maybe next year they can put it on TruTV like those play-in games that start the tournament off on Tuesday.
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