SportsCenter

A confession: I am not a sports fan, and rarely turn on the TV to get a score or a highlight of anything. And yet I watch SportsCenter—indirectly, anyway—every time I see a Daily Show, a Keith Olbermann Countdown or even a certain brand of smart-assed commercial. For sports fans, it's delivered the news and numbers, at all hours of the day, since ESPN began in 1979. For TV at large, it pioneered a kind of loose, allusive hipster humor, part Caddyshack, part Monty Python—"Bring me the finest meats and cheeses in all the land!"—that's spread throughout cable and even to news desks. Its best host pairings—like Olbermann and Dan Patrick, or Stuart Scott and Rich Eisen—were as much comic duos as newsmen. (Aaron Sorkin took on the format in his highbrow sitcom Sports Night.) As a sports show, I'm sure SportsCenter was a fine enough staple; as a TV comedy, it was en fuego.