From left, Chris Rose, Tom Arnold. Super Bowl streaker Mark Roberts and John Salley on the set of the Best Damn Sports Show Period! FOX Sports Net

HOUSTON -- Tom Arnold's knee is at it again. Up and down, up and down. It's gone on like this, practically non-stop, for more than an hour.

Arnold has this perpetually frenetic look about him and, right now, he's as worked up as he gets. He leans forward, into the camera. The studio audience -- small as it is here on location -- is whipped into a lather by a so-called "crowd warmer."

Arnold, a comedian and actor, is doing a regular bit called "Things You Wouldn't Say," a quick-hitting list of one-liners that are supposed to be things you wouldn't say to someone because you like that person too much. Today, the barbs are aimed at Arnold's co-hosts of the week.

"Hey, Dana," Arnold says into the camera, ready to zing Oakland Raiders defensive lineman Dana Stubblefield. "You're 6 feet, 2 inches tall, yet they call you 'Stubby.' Hmmm. I wonder what that's about?"

The audience roars.

Washington Redskins lineman LaVar Arrington gets his. "Hey, LaVar, you've often been compared with Lawrence Taylor. So where are our pre-game hookers, brother?" The applause grows. The New York Giants' Michael Strahan isn't spared, either.

"Hey, Michael, Brett Favre called," Arnold yells. "He's already given you the sack record -- so stop asking for his Super Bowl ring."

This is how it goes on FOX Sports Net's Best Damn Sports Show Period. It's amped up. It's irreverent. It's childish. It's stupid. Sometimes, it's so stupid it's downright funny. Sometimes it's not.

However it turns out, though, you have to give it this: BDSSP is unlike any other sports show on the tube.

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Let's be honest here. A lot of people absolutely hate this show. They hate Arnold. They hate his sidekick, the self-described "dorky white guy," Chris Rose.

They hate the endless parade of jock co-hosts who suck up to their jock guests and rapper guests and actor guests, tossing softball questions their way. They hate -- well, maybe hate is too strong of a word -- the leggy, busty, bare-midriffed, way-too-hip women who serve as "correspondents." They hate all the bad jokes.

Man, some people really hate the jokes.

Still, BDSSP, loathe it or not, has been around for nearly three years now. It's gaining an audience. It's become one of the network's signature shows. It's prepping for a whole new look later this month, with new graphics and music.

Ratings are inching up, albeit slowly, which is pretty amazing for a show that is harder to find sometimes than a new episode of Bonanza. And, by the way, a show that has had more cast changes in its 2 ½ years than Monday Night Football ever has had.

Sure, you can hate it. Lots of people do. But BDSSP is becoming harder and harder to simply ignore.

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"I thought it would be six weeks, and that's it," says Arnold, who was hired for the show's debut in July 2001. He's sitting on a high stool in an upper-floor room at Minute Maid Park in Houston during a break on the final day of shooting for the Super Bowl week edition of BDSSP His leg is pumping. Again.

Arnold, 44, downs Diet Cokes by the six-pack and mixes Nicorette with his cigars. He is self-deprecating, naturally a little goofy, uncommonly friendly and -- one of the main reasons he's here -- a true-blue sports fan.

More than anyone, his is the face of BDSSP.

"It's hard. It's hard," Arnold says of his role on the show, and he could be talking about the growth of the show as a whole. "You gotta think. And you have to listen. I listen to everybody."

Arnold is a veteran of a couple of dozen movies (including 1994's True Lies, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis, 1995's Nine Months, with Hugh Grant and Julianne Moore, and 2001's Exit Wounds, with Steven Seagal). He's done several TV series (including 1994's Tom, and the long-running Roseanne, in which he appeared with his ex-wife, Roseanne Barr).

When FOX Sports Net came to him in 2001 to talk about doing the show -- which, at that time, was barely more than an idea -- Arnold thought about it. And then the two sides talked money, and so he signed on. His contract is up later this year. He wants to come back.

"To me, it's a show about four guys ... sitting around and shooting the bull about sports," he says. "I wouldn't be here if it was a legitimate sports show. I'd rather just be a fan."

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One thing BDSSP is not is a legitimate sports show. That's what has so many people scratching their heads.

The show is not simply sports highlights, though it airs five days a week and always has sports news and highlights. It's not a simple sports talk show, though there's a lot of that, too.

It's comedy, of a sort. It's interviews. It's entertainment. It's those bunch of guys that Arnold talks about, sitting around talking about sports, telling stupid jokes and asking some questions of some big-time athletes and entertainers.

The show has had some huge names come on and sit in the cushy chairs of the set, which is kind of a cross between a barroom and a living room. (The show also does several off-set bits and interviews.) Barry Bonds has appeared on the show, as have Curt Schilling and Cal Ripken Jr. Sammy Sosa's been on. Pete Rose.

Football great Jim Brown was the one of show's first guests. John Elway has been on. Barry Sanders was on during Super Bowl week.

And the show also has had Red Sox fan Ben Affleck, and governor Schwarzenegger, and Dennis Hopper and Ice Cube and LL Cool J. Billy Bob Thornton has been on. So has Samuel L. Jackson.

The point is, this isn't SportsCenter.

The point is, it's not meant to be.

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The show's co-host, Chris Rose, remembers exactly what he was thinking in the late summer of 2001.

"'Is this the beginning of the end of my career?'," says Rose, a boyish-looking 33. "I came from CNN, which is about as journalistically sound as you can get in the sports world. I had to re-adjust my thinking."

That's been the theme of BDSSP from the start. Re-adjusting. The show has gone through a bunch of guest co-hosts and highlights readers. Lisa Guerrero, the sideline reporter for Monday Night Football, was a regular on the show. So were many others who did not end up with such a good gig.

The show has experimented with all sorts of formats. They've gone from 60 minutes to 90 minutes to two hours and, now, back to 90 minutes. The show is supposed to air twice nightly, at 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. on the 20 regional FOX Sports Net channels. But with all the rights fees that FOX Sports Net pays out to more than 60 teams, it's often bumped from its 8 p.m. slot for a game.

It hasn't been an easy go, from the start. The show has been mercilessly ripped by the critics.

"Tom Arnold and sports go together like Tori Spelling and Academy Award winner," Sports Illustrated said shortly after the show's debut.

"FOX's hiring of Arnold is destined to end up alongside D.B. Cooper's disappearance and Pauly Shore's stardom as one of the great unsolved mysteries of our time," the magazine said in another shot.

The show has been called "the worse damn sports hour in sports broadcasting, exclamation point" (again, by SI), childish, tasteless, juvenile, sophomoric ... and, at times, it has been all of those.

Boxer Mike Tyson once did a promo for the show in which he appeared as a babysitter. That brought out the protests. Arnold, specifically, too often resorts to crassness in his bid for laughs. Even the planned bits -- food fights, spitting contests, field reports from the show's curvaceous correspondents -- often produce more groans than giggles.

Rose freely admits that the show has had too many mistakes.

"We try not to repeat them," he says. "But we do."

Still, the whole crew keeps working on it, keeps revising, keeps trying to see what works and what doesn't. It's a daily struggle.

A little sheepishly, Rose wonders about the show's future. It's in his cautious nature. And he still too often finds himself trying to convince his buddies in the sports business that the show is worthy of a look.

But he's done trying to sell himself on the show. It's different, and that's what he likes about it.

"The show, what it has allowed me to do, is have fun again in sports," he says. "When you're doing just highlights from an anchor desk, you get so removed from it."

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That's the thing about BDSSP that the critics seem to forget: It's supposed to be fun. Maybe it's not, always. Maybe it rarely is. But it is, at least once in a while.

As anyone who's seen Saturday Night Live on a regular basis knows, fun is not easy to do. Comedy is hard. That's where Arnold and the show's stable of five comedy writers come in. For five shows a week, they have to manufacture enough funny bits to keep the audience engaged and the co-hosts active. And then someone -- often it's executive producer Robert Lifton -- has to determine whether that's funny or just plain stupid.

"The line," Lifton says, "is dark, dark gray."

Lifton was a former coordinating producer at SportsCenter who came to FOX Sports Net about six months ago to push BDSSP along. He wants the show, in his words, to become "younger, hipper, smarter, faster." They're all industry buzzwords, of course. But that's his charge.

"That's what I want to do," he says. "Smarten it up, but maintain its irreverence."

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At its best, BDSSP can be pretty damn good. Guerrero's interview with Bonds was a memorable one. Robin Williams once did a bike tour of San Francisco for the show. Jesse Jackson took part in a regular bit, "Fact or Fiction." John Rocker riffed on himself as a parade of minorities passed by. Affleck got to meet one of his baseball idols, Wade Boggs.

Entertainers with some ties to sports love to come on the show to talk about their favorite teams, or about sports in general. Athletes love to appear because BDSSP does not do the run-of-the-mill, mic-in-your-face grilling they get every day. In truth, it's not a grilling at all.

"John Salley [the former NBA player who has become one of the regular co-hosts] maintains that this is the only show on TV where an athlete can tell the truth," says Lifton.

The show does something other sports talk shows rarely do. It enables athletes to get up and show another side of themselves, the fun side, the goofy side, the articulate side. A side, perhaps, that may serve them well in their life after the game.

"You can get up here and have a good time and you don't have to worry about saying the right thing all the time," says Strahan.

Undoubtedly, BDSSP will make more missteps along the way. There will be more bad bits (the recent parody of the mindless Paris Hilton show, The Simple Life, for instance). More cloying over athletes. More vapid interviews with entertainers.

But the question is whether the show can get a little smarter, as Lifton says, enough to overcome the preconceived notion that people may have of it -- and by doing so garner a broader-based audience.

"I don't think there's another show out there like this," Lifton says. "It's important for people to view the show for what it is, rather than what they want it to be."

Say Arnold: "There are a lot of hard-core sports fans that don't dig us, and that's OK. You can't just do straight X's and O's all the time."

It's shortly after the show has wrapped in Houston and Lifton looks exhausted. Arnold already has left for the day. So has Rose and the rest of the cast. Lifton is staying behind to wrap things up. He's already looking ahead to the next few shows.

It's a ridiculously ostentatious name to live up to, the Best Damn Sports Show Period. And there's still a long way to go to before it even starts living up to it. If, in fact, it ever does.

The point is, like it or not, BDSSP is still trying.

John Donovan is a senior writer for SI.com.