‘Miller Night Football’ connects Dennis Miller’s controversial stint to today’s ‘MNF’ presentation

Watching the NFL Shorts documentary Miller Night Football, which premieres Tuesday night on HBO, made it hard not to think about how its topic connects to the current situation surrounding the NFL institution.

We’re in a moment when the current MNF booth may be in flux, with Troy Aikman’s contract renewal moving slowly. Rumors suggest the Manning brothers could replace him in the booth, an unconventional setup given their lack of traditional broadcasting experience. Meanwhile, Pat McAfee is developing his own MNF altcast presentation to create a viewing experience that meets modern audiences where they are.

You can see the connective tissue between all of those things in the story of how comedian Dennis Miller briefly joined the Monday Night Football booth in 2000.

At 41 minutes, Miller Night Football is a breezy, fun watch that gets in and gets out before overstaying its welcome. And while longtime NFL fans likely won’t come away learning too much they didn’t already know, it’s a good chance to fill in the nuanced blanks in their memories about why it happened, the issues that helped its demise, and how everyone felt about it.

One of the smartest things the Jeff Cameron-directed documentary does is draw a line from the original MNF booth to the Dennis Miller one, reminding us that it was intended to be a hodgepodge of personalities appealing to different audiences. It’s a reminder I certainly needed as someone who came of age in the 1990s, when the MNF booth was, as former MNF coordinating producer David Israel said, “just another football game.” To me and many others, Miller’s eventual inclusion was shocking and confusing, but something about it harkened back to the show’s entertainment-focused origins.

The documentary works as well as it does partly because all the major players sit down for interviews. Not just the on-air talent (Miller, Al Michaels, Dan Fouts, and Melissa Stark), but also the key behind-the-scenes players (Howard Katz, Fred Gaudelli, David Israel), except for Don Ohlmeyer, who passed away in 2017.

There’s also some valuable insight into how the experiment was doomed, from Miller’s eventual desire to sound like a real-deal football expert to the lack of quality games during that second season (the scourge of Al Michaels’ life). A proposed plan to move Miller into a halftime show role remains an interesting what-if, too.

As much as this era of MNF might be remembered as a bad idea or joke, NFL fans of a certain age will still get a nostalgic kick from the 2000-2001 game clips. And the inexorable march of time must have caused me to forget that Rush Limbaugh got an audition for the spot that eventually went to Miller. I won’t ruin it, but there’s a line from Israel about why that didn’t work out that was perfect and, indirectly, with ESPN catching a stray, given that they would eventually hire the controversial radio host.

The doc doesn’t seem interested in getting in the weeds, which, again, is fine for a topic like this. It does pull at strands about Miller’s resentment over how it ended and with those who remained on MNF after he was “whacked,” but lets them linger in the air. The film also cuts out what came next for Miller, which is for the best.

Ultimately, what Miller Night Football left me thinking about is how much more important that experiment was to MNF, and how it paved the way for where it is today. MNF has always oscillated between a need to entertain and a need to be “important.” You can chart the history of its booths and broadcasts to see the shifting tides of TV and, now, internet audiences, and how they want to consume the show, if they do at all. Howard Cosell and Don Meredith begat O.J. Simpson and Joe Namath, who begat Miller, who begat Tony Kornheiser, who begat Jon Gruden, who begat the BoogerMobile, to get us to the modern era of the ManningCast and (soon) Pat McAfee.

You come away realizing that putting Dennis Miller in the booth wasn’t the wacky outlier it always felt like; it was just another spin of the wheel to figure out what people want from Monday Night Football, and the wheel is still spinning.

Miller Night Football debuts on Tuesday, September 29 at 9:00 ET on HBO and HBO Max.

The post ‘Miller Night Football’ connects Dennis Miller’s controversial stint to today’s ‘MNF’ presentation appeared first on Awful Announcing.