The very mention of the name Jemele Hill on social media gets a ton of people up in arms that do not like her and will never change their mind no matter what she does in the future. Despite the dislike, she continues to excel in her life and carer.
It was just announced earlier this week that she would be doing business with ESPN again, this time as a producer of a docuseries about former NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick as part of his newly-announced first-look deal with Disney.
Hill recently joined Sports Illustrated on their podcast to shed some light on the end of her tenure with the Worldwide leader.
Jimmy Traina: “I asked her whether she thought ESPN gave her and Michael Smith a fair shot with the 6 p.m. SportsCenter. Here was her answer…”
“No, I don’t, and I never will think that. And I’m sure he agrees with me. There’s a difference between a chance and an opportunity. What we got was a chance and I think they thought they were giving us an opportunity.
“Of all the many jobs and roles that I got a chance to have at ESPN, that job is always gonna sit on the side as being the one that was the worst that I had there. Everybody came in well-intentioned. There’s a lot of blame to go around. I certainly accept mine and, I guess, by extension, Mike’s, in the sense that there were definitely things we could’ve personally done better.
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“It wasn’t a lack of support, it was the kind of support we were shown that was not really adequate, and so we wound up catching a lot of stray bullets for things that frankly we didn’t deserve. And what will never really sit right with me is that a lot of the things that went wrong were just so preventable had they just listened to us. In real time, I knew how this was gonna play out, I just did not expect it to play out somewhat involving Donald Trump and not even a year into the entire exercise. It’s just always gonna leave a bitter taste in my mouth.”
She was then asked to elaborate on not getting the right kind of support:
“If you go back, His and Hers did not end until December, and we were due to be on the air the day after the Super Bowl in February. Considering the colossal amount of marketing and everything behind it and what they wanted it to be, it made no sense to rush this show on the air. We had less than five rehearsals. We didn’t know what the show was. We weren’t allowed to pick our coordinating producers, which I think was a big mistake.
“Given what we were trying to execute, we were looking at this in the vein of what they did with Scott Van Pelt, because that was the comparison they kept giving us when they sold us on the idea of why this would work and why this may fit. Scott got given a very long time to craft out, plot out his show. He also was allowed to bring everyone with him on his show. We were not given that same leeway.
“Now we understand that we were gonna have to merge a little bit of staff because the 6 p.m. SportsCenter had a producing staff. We got that. In fact, the show producer for the 6 p.m. was somebody we wanted to keep, and she was terrific, Jasmine Ellis, but there were other parts of the show that we didn’t have as much say so and autonomy and I just don’t really think they got us.
“I think they liked a lot of the things we did on His and Hers. The things that made us an attractive fit were not things that necessarily fit SportsCenter. They loved all the viral stuff we did, like when we re-created Anchorman and re-created Step Brothers and Coming to America and even a lot of the conversations that we had, but they got so fixated on the viral stuff, and I think back to that ad campaign they ran for us for SportsCenter where it was movies music and more. Since when has the 6 p.m. SportsCenter been about music and movies?
“And even on our own show, His and Hers, 90 percent of the show was about sports. We had our fun in between we would it was always about sports. And so they put out this narrative that our show wasn’t about sports, and we never got from up under it. It was a well-intentioned but poorly thought-out ad campaign, and nobody understood what the ramifications of that would be, because one of the first bad fake narratives that got out about our show was that we weren’t about sports, and that was not true at all.”
She continued:
“Shows take time. They need to grow into something and grow into their identity. We didn’t have that benefit of time. There was a lot of publicity around us taking over the 6 p.m. SportsCenter, so I think there this expectation we were gonna have everything figured out once we got to air and we really didn’t. And not even halfway through the early part of our show we got a major leadership change, when Norby Williamson took over for Rob King, and Norby was not the one who wanted us on the 6 p.m. SportsCenter.
“So then it felt a little bit like we were these highly drafted quarterbacks who got to a franchise and they fired the GM and they fired the head coach and they want us to run a completely different offense. So then everybody is on the wrong page from the beginning.
“So we just had, as I’ve explained to people before, Donald Trump didn’t get me off SportsCenter. That whole controversy was really unrelated. I was unhappy before that happened. I knew before that happened, and Mike and I had this discussion privately many times, I was going to be done with the show when our time commitment was over with. That’s even not to arrogantly suggest that they would’ve wanted me back because they might not have, but we were guaranteed a certain amount of time on SportsCenter in that slot. And I knew once that time was up, I was done. If anything, Donald Trump did me a favor because he sped up the timetable for me or allowed that to be something that was infinitely possible.”
