I didn't know about MMA Live on ESPN until tonight, when I stumbled across it on the internet. I've been watching the Kenny Rice - Bas Rutten weekly mag Inside MMA on HD Net all the time.

The ESPN show is so much more formal. They have their classy suits and ties, and their hands folded in front of them. No jokes either. Very much like your typical network show covering a week of football.

The HD Net show is basically Kenny Rice and Bas Rutten staying light and breezy.

There are some advantages to the ESPN show. For one, they don't show any meaningless fights. The HD Net show includes a lot of clips from like some event in Vancouver featuring Gizmo Fartnocker knocking out Whitebelt Beeblebrox.

Another advantage of ESPN is that you don't ever get that stale feeling of when Kenny Rice and Bas Rutten just aren't all that funny, and you realize that they aren't professional entertainers. Put it this way. David Letterman or Groucho Marx they're not. They're usually pretty enjoyable but they can't carry a comedy show.

Anyway, the drawbacks of ESPN are more serious. It's not as much fun. It's too formal. It's too formulaic. They have some network guy leading the conversation. It's just too much like what you expect from this sort of show. Too proper. Fuck it.

Anyway, both shows are pretty interesting, and both have their faults. But with the HD Net show we get to see some current MMA fighters looking awkward on a panel, and that's pretty good. At least some of them show a little personality. Kenny and Bas had Gina Carano cracking up. Plus, they regularly schedule shy Kevin Ferguson on the panel because he's trained by Basito. Now that's one guy who is a fish out of water in the spotlight. Seems like a very nice, soft spoken man.