In her first week back at ESPN, Michelle Beadle interviewed muppets, got attacked by a bear and tucked her dress into K-Mart khakis in a Jim Harbaugh skit.
It’s the kind of work she enjoys doing and the reason why she could not be more thrilled to be back at ESPN and away from NBC.
“It was the lowest for me,” Beadle told The Post of her two years at NBC.
“I think being somewhat of a workaholic — and it’s not healthy by any stretch — but I think you place your self-worth on your career, and as far as I was concerned, my career was crap. I started to doubt myself, whether I even wanted to do TV, I thought about quitting. I found myself in a position where I was working for people I didn’t want to work for and I didn’t know how to get out of it. So, it was just bad, a bad overall feeling.”
It wasn’t supposed to be that way. When she left ESPN for NBC in May 2012, Beadle was seen as one of the rising stars in the business. She was slated to host her own show, “The Crossover,” in addition to having a role on “Access Hollywood” and several other gigs, including the Olympics.
Instead, she clashed with “Crossover” co-host Dave Briggs and NBC brass. The show was blown up and re-branded with just Beadle, but then was canceled in September 2013.
“The whole thing was a hot mess,” Beadle said. “And I knew there was nothing for me to do there. The place just wasn’t a good fit for me … There are people that are over there that I don’t miss working with or for. So, it was the way everything was handled, the way the show was put together from the beginning, it was not what I was told was going to happen. I didn’t like my job anymore, and it was not fun having to go to work and pretend. It was great, a lot of people get stuck in jobs that they don’t like and it’s horrible for them and I was fortunate to have people fight for me to get me out of it, so I can go back to being a happy, smiling person. It was just a bad fit all around. That’s all I can say without getting into too much trouble.”
When asked for a response, an NBC spokesperson said, “We wish her well.”
Beadle told Linda Cohn in a podcast over the weekend that she “made it pretty clear that I would no longer be interested in doing anything for them.” After she sat on NBC’s bench for a while, ESPN helped negotiate her out of that deal with a year left. That transition was completed when she returned last Monday to ESPN2’s “SportsNation,” the show she hosted in her previous stint.
Michelle Beadle Returns from ESPN Dev on Vimeo.
“I never saw how going back to a job I loved at the No. 1 sports network in the world could be seen as a step backwards. There are people on Twitter that think it is,” she said.
It’s unlikely her future at ESPN will just be “SportsNation,” which she now co-hosts with Max Kellerman and Marcellus Wiley. The show is set in Los Angeles, and her plan is to split time between there and New York.
“I think ‘SportsNation’ was the first thing on everybody’s mind. When I came back, I wanted to make sure I did as much as possible,” Beadle said. “I think that both sides are pretty open to that this time around. I hope they use me as much as possible, since that’s what keeps me going and keeps me alive. It’s what I thought the last few years would be like and they weren’t.”