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Hard Knocks, Episode One: A Live Blog.

| August 6th, 2024

8:56 PM ET. Full disclosure: I am deeply regretting the commitment I made to review these episodes. I don’t even want to watch them. But I do love a Liev Schreiber voiceover. For me, he stands with Peter Coyote as our finest documentary voiceover artists. (Coyote does many of the epic Ken Burns films.)

8:59 PM ET. How many of these Game of Thrones series need to exist? I watched a few episodes of this latest one and it’s just people arguing in old timey conference rooms about tactics. Boring as boring can be.

9:03 PM ET. Blues Brothers music…already. This is going to be a tough watch.

9:05 PM ET. Liev sounds a bit weathered. The depth of his vocal is missing. Not happy about this.

9:06 PM ET. I guess Cole Kmet is not a draw for White Sox fans. What was the attendance that day? 11?

9:06 PM ET. Eberflus: “Winning doesn’t make you a winner.” I disagree, Matt. I believe that’s the only requirement.

9:08 PM ET. They are MILKING the first ten minutes of this episode. They can’t have much.

9:12 PM ET. Caleb couldn’t sing. “You don’t have to be able to carry a tune, to carry a team,” Liev says. This show is written by children.

9:16 PM ET. Very excited about the Harris/Walz ticket. Walz seems a genuinely good dude who’ll connect with the union/rural voter that Dems have lost to the Trump types over the last eight years.

9:17 PM ET. If they knew Saban was going to be there this week (episode) they should have made the entire thing about him. Let him host the episode. He’s a compelling figure.

9:20 PM ET. First interesting moment, drawing the parallel between Saban’s advice and that advice in action. Saban is the second greatest football coach to ever live by a reason.

9:22 PM ET. Eberflus’s haircut getting airtime is not surprising. But I loved hearing him call Ron Rivera “sir.” Maybe I’m old fashioned but that level of respect warms me.

9:25 PM ET. I like Jonathan Owens’s bulldogs, especially the one in the diaper.

9:27 PM ET. Isn’t it amazing how few planes crash?

9:29 PM ET. This episode banked on the songs carrying a lot of weight. (But this “God Bless the USA” feels intensely staged.) But Theo seems to be the white guy of choice for this season, and he’s guaranteed to not make the team.

9:32 PM ET. If this were any other team I would have changed the channel. This is so fundamentally boring.

9:33 PM ET. Kevin Warren has arrived! And he made sure to pretend he’s important! (Honestly, watching him cook breakfast would be better than this.)

9:36 PM ET. OJ Simpson and Tom Hanks in…The Odd Couple.

9:38 PM ET. Why did Bears social give away the slip n’ slide sequence? Not that it was interesting but at least it would have been unique.

9:41 PM ET. I got nothing.

9:42 PM ET. We’re really going to watch the Hall of Fame game with commentary from Eberflus’s family?

9:45 PM ET. My favorite moment of this episode is Joe Buck talking directly to Liev directly. “Anything for a fan, Joe.” At least I got a laugh out of this snoozefest.

9:51 PM ET. Theo is already done.

9:52 PM ET. They have to cut this series down to four episodes. This episode didn’t have a single compelling moment. Awful television.

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