Al Samuels first tried improv comedy as a Dartmouth undergraduate after a classmate told him he was “funny and stupid.” Today, Samuels, MBA ’95, writes, co-produces and stars in Sports Action Team, a loosely scripted send-up of ESPN’s SportsCenter that pivots around a group of high-ego, low-talent sportscasters. Shot in Samuels’s native Chicago, the show operates on a spartan budget of less than $150,000 per episode. Still, the producers have cajoled celebrities like Will Ferrell and Conan O’Brien (left, with Samuels) into cameos, and many professional athletes gamely play the foils to the pompous, bumbling reporters.
NBC initially ordered a few episodes for its West Coast affiliate stations, hoping to retain NFL viewers in the Sunday night postgame slot. With almost no publicity, Sports Action Team gained a following and spread to the top 10 television markets for the 2006 and 2007 seasons. Samuels hopes to have another batch of episodes ready to accompany the network’s coverage of the 2008 Olympics this summer. “I wasn’t sure whether I’d be welcomed back in the comedy world after business school,” he says of the show’s surprising success. “I guess I didn’t smell too much of money.”
—TED BOSCIA, MA ’07
