HEH: With Conservative Viewership Tanking, ESPN Gets MSNBC to Run Ads on SportsCenter.

No joke. During NBC’s late ’70 nadir, I remember them running promo spots for the ill-fated (and ill-conceived and ill-executed) Supertrain — on St. Louis’s tiny UHF station. You have to be desperate to imagine that you’ll find the audience for your new big budget show sandwiched in between mid-afternoon reruns of Sanford and Son and Rhoda.

So this is familiar TV territory, both the desperation and the nadir.