Report: HBO won't produce '24/7' for 2015 Winter Classic
Just a day after the NHL announced Nationals Park at the host site of the 2015 Winter Classic, it sounds like the league will be losing one of its prominent Winter Classic-related features. According to Greg Brady of the Fan590 in Toronto, HBO will not be producing the extremely popular “24/7: Road to the Winter Classic” television series.
It seemed that this year's Winter Classic opponents, the Washington Capitals and Chicago Blackhawks, could have provided some great personalities for the show to work with, but it sounds like it was HBO's decision to move on.
More from Brady:
The show has been featured on HBO for the last three Winter Classics starting with the 2011 event featuring the Capitals and Pittsburgh Penguins. It has become popular with fans because of its “fly-on-the-wall” feel as the cameras were granted unprecedented access and were able to run uncensored remarks as a premium channel.
There have been a lot of classic moments, too, like everything Bruce Boudreau said while head coach of the Capitals, Randy Carlyle’s famous toaster malfunction, all of the on-ice trash talk, the sights and sounds of an NHL fight with mic’d up players, and perhaps most of all, Ilya Bryzgalov.
So this news definitely comes as a disappointment, but perhaps the writing was on the wall.
Last season, during the buildup to the Toronto Maple Leafs and Detroit Red Wings Winter Classic in Ann Arbor, Mich., cameras were tossed out of dressing rooms at times and lost some of the free-reign access that made the show great.
Perhaps that’s the reason, or perhaps the formula just got stale. Last season’s “24/7” did not receive the rave reviews of years previous as the entertainment value seemed to decrease some. That might have been tied to the access situation, though.
“24/7” was revolutionary in the typically tight-lipped NHL, where injury reports are vague and the answers almost always canned in interviews. It offered some great insights into the game and will probably be missed by many hockey fans.
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