CBS To Make History With All-Female Sports Talk Show 'We Need To Talk' Premiere On Sept. 30
CBS is set to make history this week when it airs the first episode of its brand new all-female sports talk show, We Need to Talk, on Tuesday. And it couldn't come at a better time, as the role of women in sports continues to make headlines in light of the domestic violence cases surrounding the NFL, former WNBA star Becky Hammon's hiring as the first full-time assistant coach in the NBA, and so much more.
"We've been discussing and developing this content for a long time and have been really focused on it in the past six months," CBS Sports president David Berson told Cynopsis Sports. "Interestingly, while the show has been in development for a really long time, I think the news we've seen in the past couple of months shows that there is a need for a show like this in the sports landscape. We feel the time is right and long overdue and that CBS is really the right place for it."
The show will air weekly on CBS Sports from 10 to 11 p.m. – covering the entire landscape of sports news from the NFL to women's college basketball to auto racing – and will feature a rotating panel of hosts. Some of the names on tap include CBS' own Lesley Visser, Amy Trask, Tracy Wolfson, Dana Jacobson and Allie LaForce, as well as Laila Ali, Lisa Leslie, Dara Torres and Swin Cash, among others.
"The thing I liked about it is that the people on the panel are smart, experienced in sports and are passionate about what they do," said the show's coordinating producer, Suzanne Smith.
"They look at things from a different point of view," she added, "not just because they are women, but because of the experiences that they have had. We have women who won multiple gold medals and trained for years; we also have women who have been at the top of the position in both TV and sports. It is a unique group that is put together and the opinions that are going to come out of this and the facts and experiences that they rely on are going to be unprecedented."