Howard Stern is unlistenable, but he was shrewd (jewd?) enough to recognize that radio changed fundamentally in 2009.
Cumia was fired in 2014.
During that five year span, someone should have read the writing on the wall and retooled the show.
Tom Leykis was basically the west coast Shock Jock Du Jour, and his show also ended in 2009, the same day that Adam Carolla's show ended. (They were on the same station, and the station folded.)
Imagine if you were Joe Rogan or Marc Maron in 2005. You had to get on a plane, fly to New York, stay overnight, and show up at 6am, just to shoot the shit with Opie and Anthony for an hour.
This is a colossally inefficient way of making a living.
There was nothing that Opie and Anthony could have done to save the show, unless they made it into something completely different. The format of the O&A show dated all the way back to the 1990s, when radio shows were three hours long but 50% of the show was ads. So they only needed to produce 90 minutes of content AND they could pad the show with phone calls.
This was especially noticeable with The Tom Leykis show; when he lost his radio gig and started doing a podcast, the wheels just fell off the show, because he had no callers, for the most part. Leykis was HUGELY dependent on phone calls, and once he was no longer on the radio, the lack of callers just destroyed the quality of the show. Even worse was that when he DID get calls on his podcast (it was released live, like The No Agenda Podcast), all of the callers were a bunch of ball washers. Just made for a really boring listen; literally ever caller was just sucking Tom's dick.
The other day, I put on the Adam Carolla podcast for the first time in ages... and it was actually quite good.
I was shocked. Carolla had been running into the same issue that O&A ran into; basically he was reaching a point where he couldn't get any good guests on his show. He was bringing in some seriously irrelevant guests, like Rob Schneider. Up until a year ago, Carolla was still following the same bullshit "morning zoo" format that he'd been doing since the 1990s. He had a dude on the show who played dumb sound effects, and a girl he paid to read the news. Literally the exact same format you'd here on morning radio 25 years ago. Carolla fired them last year, and now the show is mostly just an O&A style "hang" where he mostly shoots the shit with his producer, with the occasional guest thrown into the mix.
I think the reason that the Carolla show kinda works is because he's willing to fire people that he doesn't have chemistry with.
The irony here, is that the best hope for the O&A show was probably if they'd fired Jim Norton and replaced him with Bill Burr. Their boss (Eric Logan) wanted to do that, and he didn't get his way. It's not just that Bill Burr is funnier than Jim Norton, he also has better chemistry with O&A. By 2005-ish, it was really obvious that Norton and Ant had chemistry, but there was a rift with Opie. Burr was also willing to shit on anyone, which makes great radio.
Basically, the problem with Opie and Anthony wasn't them; it was Jim Norton. Yes he's done some absolutely hilarious shows, but his jokes are just unforgivably repetitive and Burr was a better fit.
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