Billy Bush and Pat McAfee’s names together feel like a game of Mad Libs.
Yet, as the 53-year-old Bush prepares for a media comeback, he appears to view McAfee as a blueprint.
It’s a bold comparison, though perhaps not a realistic one. While McAfee’s style has catapulted him atop the sports media food chain, Bush clearly doesn’t have the same cultural and industry weight he once possessed. But, for what it’s worth, he does have some sort of a background in sports.
A correspondent for NBC at the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Bush later hosted Access Hollywood’s coverage of the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino and the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing.
A tad different from being a former NFL punter having a popular program on ESPN.
Sure, both men have dabbled in controversy and unfiltered content, but the similarities seemingly end there.
That seems like all Bush needed to cling onto — the saying controversial things or having someone on your show say controversial things part.
By 2016, he had transitioned to a co-host role on the third hour of NBC’s Today show. However, that role was short-lived. He became a central figure in a media firestorm when an infamous 2005 Access Hollywood recording surfaced. The leaked recording features President Donald Trump — two decades ago — lewdly claiming that because he was a star, he could do anything, including grabbing women by their private parts.
Bush laughed along. He was fired from Today, and his career hit a standstill.
Access Hollywood executive producer Rob Silverstein also lost his job, but he’s found Bush again. It’s unclear what his role will be, but based on the Variety article that detailed Bush’s new video podcast, Hot Mics, he’ll be involved in some capacity.
It was Silverstein who invoked McAfee’s name as an example of how raw, unfiltered content has found a home in modern media.
“We used McAfee as the example,” Silverstein told Variety.
ESPN has embraced McAfee’s unorthodox style while also granting him something rare in the industry— complete creative control. That level of autonomy has been key to McAfee’s success and has become a cornerstone of a brand that seems to attract controversy, like bees to honey.
But the McAfee formula isn’t a one-size-fits-all blueprint. How it plays out in a different medium starting Jan. 13 remains to be seen.
[Variety]
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.