Cheap Seats (TV series)
Cheap Seats without Ron Parker, or Cheap Seats: Without Ron Parker commonly shortened to Cheap Seats, is a television program broadcast on ESPN Classic and hosted by brothers Randy and Jason Sklar. The brothers appear as fictional ESPN tape librarians who amuse themselves by watching old, campy sports broadcasts and lampooning them. Produced by Mark Shapiro, Showrunner, Todd Pellegrino, James Cohen and Joseph Maar, Cheap Seats was originally an hour-long program. There were eight one hour-long episodes in the first season, all of which were edited to fit a 30-minute time slot.
Not to be confused with The Cheap Seats (American TV series) or The Cheap Seats (Australian TV series).Cheap Seats
United States
4
78
30 minutes
February 4, 2004 –
November 19, 2006
A number of actors and comedians were featured in various pre recorded and in-studio comedy skits on the show, including Jim Gaffigan, H. Jon Benjamin, Paul Rudd, David Cross, Zach Galifianakis, Ed Helms, Eugene Mirman, Michael Ian Black, Nick Kroll, Kristen Schaal, Judah Friedlander, Nick Swardson, Mike Birbiglia, Paul Rudd, Doug Benson, Kathy Griffin, Carlos Alazraqui and Patton Oswalt.
Most of the broadcasts are from ESPN's archives. Among them:
Cheap Seats was shot in New York City (with segments filmed in Los Angeles) and had made use of local comedians as guest stars in its sketches. Most of the bit parts were played by stand-up comics whom Jason and Randy met during their years on the road as standup comedians themselves. The show was influenced chiefly by Mystery Science Theater 3000 and MTV's Beavis and Butt-head, as the hosts' comment on the material in the style of a peanut gallery. The "Creative Breaking/K-1 Fighting" episode guest-starred the cast of Mystery Science Theater 3000, in their theatrical silhouette form, cracking on sketches the Sklars performed.
ESPN Classic broadcast an all-day marathon of Cheap Seats episodes on Thanksgiving Day in 2004, an homage to the similar marathons of MST3K that were frequently run on Comedy Central during Thanksgiving in the first half of the 1990s.
After the first season, a SportsCentury mockumentary was filmed about how its first season made a large impact on the world. Archived interviews from past SportsCentury episodes were edited into the program as if the interview subjects were speaking about the show itself.
Series finale[edit]
A special titled This is Inside Cheap Seats that aired on April 17, 2006, though most of the content therein was fictional. The fourth and final season premiered on June 5, 2006.
In the "Fall Preview" article in the September 25, 2006 issue of ESPN The Magazine, the Sklars announced that "after 77 episodes, we're bringing Cheap Seats to a close by cleaning out our video closet in a very special series finale." It aired on November 19, and included racquetball, amateur bowling, curling, model airplane racing, and ping-pong. The episode's main focus was on the Sklars (fictitiously) getting a job as anchors on ESPN's SportsCenter. However, it turned out they weren't hired to be anchors, but as errand boys to do the anchors' bidding, causing the brothers to consider going back to the show, which was currently being hosted by then New York Yankees outfielder Johnny Damon (a fan of the show) and a recurring character called the "Score Settler." Before the last episode, ESPN Classic presented 12 previous episodes in a six-hour "finale-a-thon."
Cheap Seats reruns do not currently air on the now-defunct ESPN Classic or any other network. Selected episodes from the first season were at one time, but are no longer, available for purchase through the iTunes Store.