ABC added nothing by dressing up primetime games

	Dennis Miller entered the booth in 2000 and lasted for two seasons. Stephen Sigoloff/HBO
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ABC TV's Monday Night Football promotion is like a restaurant that tries to attract customers by telling you how entertaining its waiters are. Then when one of them keeps dropping dishes, management will bring in a new one, and then another, all the time keeping the pitch going about how this is a promotion not to be missed.

The food? Naah, nobody cares about that. It's our waiters they're interested in, our stars.

The sick thing is that journalists buy into this nonsense ... TV columnists, molders of public opinion. I've already begun to read the hand-wringing about the departure of ABC as purveyor of Monday Night Football, as if some great monument were being torn down. ABC is leaving? Who cares? Certainly not me. Bring in the next network, the next set of waiters to serve our food. Make sure it's hot.

I've never bought into ABC's "We Are the Show" approach, especially during what they (and few others) like to call their Golden Age. You know, Howard Cosell and Don Meredith, the limos, the parties and the fabulous expense accounts. Oh, the byplay was occasionally amusing. It's fun when a waiter drops an occasional gag on you. But OK, let's get through it and get to the reason why we came to the restaurant. The meal. The food.

A complicated dish perhaps need some explanation, and in televised football the explainers are called analysts. Through the years there has been painfully little of it on ABC. Cosell was not capable of it, Meredith couldn't be bothered, except occasionally. Instead we had the byplay -- two waiters standing at the tray stand bouncing one-liners off each other, while the folks who paid for the meal were trying to eat.

Sure there have been some ABC announcers who tried to do an honest job of analysis -- Boomer Esiason, Dan Dierdorf, etc. They were canned. Not enough charisma. Dan Fouts was a terrific analyst. All you have to do is tune into the college games to see how good he is. No one doing NFL games is in his class. But during his two years with ABC (2000 and 2001) he had the misfortune to share the booth with Dennis Miller, who tried to make the games a personal vehicle for his cleverness, and failed miserably.

I mean did the American viewer double up with laughter when Dennis told us that Bob McElwee, the ref, was a look-alike for the old screen actor, Victor Jory? Yeah, I remember Jory and I saw a resemblance, but hey, Dennis, you're not reaching anybody. How about saving it for your late night stand-up? But ABC was into its "clever" phase then, narrowly avoiding what would have been its biggest disaster, hiring Rush Limbaugh. Oh, it came close, the mere fact of which goes to show you how skewed these people's vision was.