Colder Pizza: Some Rest for the Weary, But not Much

By Seth Arenstein

There are few better illustrations in cable of a 24/7 culture than a daily morning show. For ESPN2's Cold Pizza, there's at least one person working 24/5; heck, the talent comes in at 5:30 a.m. But it used to be 4:30, as Cold Pizza recently pushed its start time back from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m.

Those early mornings aren't a burden for Pizza's young talent, but they're not quite as easy for 50-somethings Woody Paige and Skip Bayless, who looked a bit ragged when CableWORLD visited the set to find out how talent and staff are using the extra hour. Energetic, young co-anchor Kit Hoover says "with both a 1-year-old and a 2-year-old running around the house, you can only guess what I do with the extra hour we got in the morning. Sleep."

Morning Becomes Selective: Thea Andrews (left), ESPN2 Cold Pizza co-host, couldn't convince colleagues Kit Hoover (center) and Jay Crawford to engage in an early hour book club when the show moved its start time back from 7 a.m. to 8 a.m.

We're not sure if long-legged co-anchor Thea Andrews was pulling ours when she told us "I tried to get Kit and [co-anchor] Jay [Crawford] to start a book club with me, but they weren't really into it for some reason." Her fallback? "Now every morning I go for a brisk six-mile run. Really, I swear."

Executive producer Brian Donlon barely notices the new start time. "I still get in between 4 and 4:30 and use the [extra hour] to further fine-tune" the show. "The later hour actually makes it a later day for Cold Pizza. Not only does the show slide back an hour, but so does the production day. So our 10 a.m. planning meeting for the next day is now 11 a.m.; our 3 p.m. production meeting is now 4 p.m.

Donlon's not alone: Nearly 29 million employees start their workday between 4:30 a.m. and 7:29 a.m., up from 27 million in 1997, the Dept. of Labor says. "The hardest part of this job is managing the grind," Donlon says.