Fantasy football is pretty popular with huge nerds who refuse to acknowledge how nerdy they are, so Fox has decided to finally embrace this cool trend that has been sweeping the nation for the last 50 years or so and make a TV show about fantasy football. Actually, it’s surprising that Fox—or one of its basic cable brothers like FX or FXX—hasn’t thought of this already. A show about a group of bros who all play fantasy football in the same league, and the league gets together every week to (ostensibly) talk about fantasy football, but in actuality they just goof around and make fun of Paul Scheer. Also, Jason Mantzoukas is sometimes there.
Anyway, Fox’s new fantasy football show is nothing like that, because a show like that would never last for more than seven seasons. The new project—which is just a pilot at this point—is called Fantasy Life, and it’s based on the life of ESPN’s fantasy sports expert Matthew Berry. It will star Entourage’s Kevin Connolly as Mitch, a guy who gets a job hosting a fantasy football show on a sports network that is definitely not ESPN, but will probably be exactly like ESPN. According to Deadline, he’ll be joined by an ex-football player named Chuck—played by James Caan—who “doesn’t get fantasy football since he played real football and suffered real pain.” Eventually, Deadline says Mitch somehow impresses Chuck and the two are able to work together—probably because Mitch explains the “real pain” that fantasy football players probably go through when they can’t come up with stupid puns for their team names.