The NFL Today airs every Sunday before the early NFL game. You've probably seen it before. It's that show where a bunch of former players and coaches sit around a desk and force themselves to chuckle at really bad puns. This week, since it was the day before Halloween, they decided to do something special. They decided to create an NFL-themed Halloween skit -- inexplicably starring Kris Jenkins -- that was so uniformly awful, it may have set a new standard for "unfunny things on television," venturing into waters of lousy that were previously only theoretical.
Watch at your own risk. You've been warned.
Wow. Just wow. I've watched that three times, and each time it just gets worse and worse. Every viewing is like splitting a bad-comedy atom, and a whole slew of bad tumbles out and envelopes me.
Let's start with the fact that Kris Jenkins has the worst delivery of these horrible lines that you can ask for, and just about every "joke" features editing or dubbing trickery to make it look THIS GOOD.
Also, how in the world does a network as large as CBS manage to scrounge up a group of child "actors" this uniformly terrible? The best actor in this entire thing is the kid who is dressed as Boomer Esiason, and he wins that honor by the virtue of being the only person not to deliver their line like they've never spoken out loud before, and have also managed to fit a catcher's mitt in their mouth. And that kid playing LeBron James? I'm pretty sure children understand the concept of "mouthing words," yet the director clearly told that poor kid to just stand outside the window and open and close his mouth. Also, during Jenkins' exchange with "LeBron," the door is clearly open, yet he tells the kid to take a hike. You're a big meanie, Kris. I don't like you.
The most egregious thing about this endless segment though (and it really does just go on and on forever; when I first watched it air I yelled out WHY IS THIS STILL HAPPENING about two-thirds of the way through), is that although these horrible, sadistic human beings felt the need to compile this four-minute nightmare and cram it full of the worst NFL jokes and visual gags ever created, is that they couldn't even bother squeezing in a joke about the Arizona Cardinals. Not one. You had at least four different moments where a whole group of different teams walk through for the sake of one joke, but still no Cardinals. You had a screaming night terror of a joke at the very end where the writers clearly ran up to the director and said, "We forgot to make a joke about the 49ers and the Lions!" and yet still no Cardinals. Was the red bird from the smash game Angry Birds supposed to represent the Cardinals? Were we meant to infer that? Because Jenkins clearly looked at them all and said, "The Eagles!"
That's the state of the Arizona Cardinals, I guess. They're so awful this year that they don't even rate an appearance in the NFL-exclusive Worst Thing of All Time. Maybe they got bumped in favor of the Andrew Luck reference.
I'm sorry I made you all watch that, but I wanted you to be as unhappy as I am. The only thing that the YouTube version is missing is when the video package was thrown back to the studio, which was met with scattered forced chuckles, which caused me to flee the room screaming.
Shame on you, CBS. And if any of you live near Kris Jenkins, don't go to his Halloween party. It's all just nonsensical puns and bad attitude.