To say that We Need To Talk, CBS Sports Network’s new show with a cast of all women, picked a perfect launch date might understate the timing.
The show made its debut on September 30, right as the sports world around it had exploded thanks to the NFL’s fumbled handling of the domestic violence case involving Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice.
The first episode jumped right in. Panelists produced a vivid back-and-forth, open, and honest discussion about domestic violence not just in the sports world, but in the lives of women all across the country–and three women on the show shared deeply personal experiences with domestic violence from their own pasts.
The segment was illuminating, too, for what happened over the rest of the show, which turned its attention to other topics, from the Ryder Cup to the Oakland Raiders coaching situation, topics that had nothing to do with women in sports or the ways sports can highlight issues facing women. It was indicative of what CBS’ producers and executives said was the aim of We Need to Talk: a show where women talk about sports, not a women’s sports show.
Through the first three weeks, it has lived up to that billing. It might star 12 women, but it is discussing many of the topics germane in the sports world at large, including Florida State quarterback Jameis Winston’s off-field troubles, Kobe Bryant’s return from injury, and Major League Baseball’s playoffs. And it has done it without much yelling back-and-forth that typifies so many sports talk shows now.
There are challenges to making the show stick: a weekly format in a world of daily takes makes it harder to stay fresh and illuminating, and CBS Sports Network is still somewhat obscure, lesser known than giants like ESPN and possibly even more apt competitors like NBC Sports Network. And women’s voices remain an anomaly in the sports commentary world–90 percent of the sports journalism industry is white and male, according to a Women’s Media Center study.
But the biggest challenge of the new show, which has commanded positive reviews from The New York Times, Awful Announcing, and plenty of other outlets, is proving that it doesn’t conform to a critique offered by Deadspin’s Diane Moskovitz, who wrote that the show’s premise screams: “Put all the women over there where they can talk among themselves. Now, excuse us while the big boys on the big broadcasts talk all the way over here.”
Women’s Media Center president Julie Burton agreed that the concept would be problematic if it were the only way to include women’s voices on TV, but in the current media landscape, she sees it as progress.
“If the only way to for women to be given prominent sports talk positions is to separate them from other sports talk shows–that’s a problem,” Burton said. “It’s important to monitor whether women are also given other opportunities to be visible in sports talk shows, not just women-only outlets. Regarding this specific show, how long have we only heard from men? Having any women sports commentators on any show is progress and that is a direction we need to move in.”
And the women actually participating in We Need to Talk have a different take too. Lesley Visser, the veteran journalist who serves as one of the regular cast’s most notable names, said the show’s roots–and the long effort to put more women on TV, in the press box, and around sports generally–allow her to see the show as definite progress.
“The arc of my career started when it said ‘no women allowed’ on press credentials,” Visser said. “To go from there to a place where a dozen women from every aspect of the business can do this, it’s amazing.”
The regular cast includes Visser and Andrea Kremer, another pioneering sports reporter, experienced athletes-turned-broadcasters like Lisa Leslie and Summer Sanders, and prominent women from the business side of sports like Amy Trask, who served as the chief executive of the Oakland Raiders from 1997 to 2013. The rest of the cast, which rotates based on each show’s content, includes reporters Dana Jacobson, Allie LaForce, and Tracy Wolfson; former Olympic swimmer Dara Torres, WNBA player Swin Cash, boxing champion Laila Ali, and former tennis pro-turned-broadcaster Katrina Adams.
Two or three decades ago, Visser said, when she, Kremer, and other women in the sports would “all be at parties, talking about what we thought the Bears were doing, or about other issues, and we’d say, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if…'”
USA Today columnist Christine Brennan, a frequent contributor to TV networks ABC and PBS, was often part of those conversations too.
“I am for anything that gets more women on air talking about sports, so I’m thrilled CBS Sports is doing this,” Brennan agreed. “I’m glad to see someone finally doing this after all these conversations over the years about a women’s sports talk show.”
There seems, as Awful Announcing’s review observed, to be somewhat of a generational difference in how the show is viewed. Women from the forefront of the fight to include women’s voices at all see the show as a bigger step in the direction of progress than those in the new media, who work in an environment that can be more open to women and were more likely to come up in an age where, even if women were still a distinct minority in the sports media, they were at least visible.
“My instant reaction was based on how it was being billed, as this novel idea,” SBNation’s Sarah Kogod, who wrote a pointed criticism of the concept upon its announcement, said. Kogod’s piece noted that there were already women producing major NFL broadcasts for both Fox and CBS. Women have also ascended into broadcast booths for major college football and basketball games on ESPN; they work in all sorts of notable roles throughout the sports media world.
“I thought it trivialized the work women were already doing on TV,” Kogod said. “There are already women on TV working as reporters, analysts, directors, producers.”
Kogod also worried that focusing so heavily on the history of having an “all-women’s show,” as CBS Sports did in releases announcing We Need to Talk, made it harder to sell the idea that it was a sports talk show rather than a show designed for women.
“When you’re billing it as The View meets anything, it comes across as a gimmick. When you bill it that way, it alienates a lot of people,” Kogod said. The average male sports fan, she added, “isn’t watching this show. Those are the people we need to put these smart women in front of.” The accomplishments of the women on this show, she added, make that all the more apparent.
“The women are smart. And that just highlights to me that they need to be on panels with male colleagues, not in the middle of an act,” Kogod said. “If that we’re already happening, I’d have less of an objection.”
Multiple observers in the middle–who have studied women’s roles in the sports media and advocated for more diversity, rather than falling on either side of a generational divide within the industry–said they see the show both as progress and as a potential vehicle to push women more into the mainstream.
“I don’t think our ultimate goal is to have a separate show, but it can help us reach our goal,” Kristin Gilger, the associate dean of Arizona State University’s Cronkite School of Journalism, said. “But it’s a step. It raises issues that wouldn’t be raised. It’s another step in the direction of having a conversation that needs to be had.”
Over the show’s first three episodes, there are signs that those steps could happen. The diversity of the cast allows it to showcase specific talents and repertoires, as when Wolfson and LaForce, both of whom have worked as sideline reporters on CBS’ Southeastern Conference football broadcasts, interviewed Mississippi State head coach Dan Mullen, or when it featured Kremer, an experienced NFL reporter, and Trask, the former Raiders CEO, in the middle of a segment about advice for NFL commissioner Roger Goodell (when viewers learned that Kremer once had “an informal meeting” with Goodell about diversity in the NFL’s front office).
Highlighting that sort of variety should help build the audience, but it could also expand opportunities for the show’s participants and, by virtue, other women in similar roles too. And, as Kogod recommended, those roles could be as regulars on other, mostly male sports shows.
In the end, though those involved in the show and its early critics may disagree on how much progress its presence represents, they have the same aim in mind: to continue breaking barriers for women in the sports media. And while her focus remains primarily on making We Need To Talk a high-quality show on its own merits, Visser sees it as an opportunity to further the greater cause.
“Everything is a pivot point of its own. There was a time when black quarterbacks got notice. Now you don’t notice it,” Visser said. “Men aren’t genetically born to know sports. You’re not born with the ability to recognize a safety blitz. It’s about passion, and women have that passion too.”
Travis Waldron is a reporter at ThinkProgress, where he covers sports at the intersection of politics and policy. His work has also appeared at TheAtlantic.com, Salon, and in various other outlets. Follow him @Travis_Waldron.