One of the few films I watched this year was the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary about Mike and the Mad Dog, the long-running WFAN radio program that became synonymous with the sound of the New York sports scene through the 1990’s and 2000’s. The movie looked at the history of the show and its two hosts, Mike Francesca and Chris ‘Mad Dog’ Russo, and examined the factors that contributed both to the show’s success as well as its ultimate unraveling.
I thought one scene did especially well to demonstrate why Francesca’s straight-ahead, no-BS style was so successful on NYC radio. There was a brief clip about ‘the power seat’, the name for the chair in the recording studio that was considered more important than the other. Among other things, ‘the power seat’ was generally reserved for the lead host. As documentaries tend to do, ‘the power seat’ dynamic was explained through a series of quick cuts to a number of people giving brief explanations about ‘the power seat’ - the power seat is where the lead guy sits, it's important who sits in the power seat, and so on.
All of these comments helped me understand ‘the power seat’ a little better. I suppose that was the point of including those clips with those comments. Of course, reader, you must be wondering, how did the star of the film, the great voice of NYC sports radio, explain ‘the power seat’?
Here was Francesca’s 'analysis' - in talk radio, there’s a power seat.
And… done! No further comments about the matter, at least as far as Mike Francesca was concerned.
Did this comment help us viewers understand any better what the power seat was? Of course not. But I think it helped me understand who Franscesca was, and how little of a shit he gave about explaining little details like 'the power seat', and how he didn't need to explain shit to demonstrate his expertise, and I think all of that was far more important for me to know than anything about the power seat. After all, the documentary wasn’t about the layout of a studio, it was about two radio hosts and why they did so well on this show together, and this two-second non-explanation of what the power seat was did more to help me understand Francesca’s style than any other part of the film.
