“I'm very curious to see what you're going to ask me because I can't fathom what's interesting about me right now,” says Katie Nolan, right after we sit down and order cheap beers. We're at The Paris Cafe in New York’s South Street Seaport, across the road from the studios where she hosts the weekly sports show Always Late with Katie Nolan for ESPN+, the network's streaming subscription service. (Full disclosure, my father is John Skipper, the former president of ESPN.)
Nolan's rise to the top tier of sports personalities was swift—but it was marked with stops and starts. She's been through a revolving door of shows and projects, on networks that clamored to secure her talent but couldn't quite figure out how best to showcase it.
That climb began in 2011, when she was tending bar in Boston. “As a waitress it was tough because you have to be nice and smile and whatever,” she says. “As a bartender, you can sometimes, depending on the clientele, tell people to go fuck themselves, which is nice.” Around the same time, she started using that barroom candor in self-produced videos for Guyism, a site geared toward—you guessed it!—guys (it has since been brought under the BroBible umbrella). Solo in front of a camera, she delivered a monologue of one-liners, Weekend Update style, displaying a comedic timing and self-deprecating, sarcastic charm that landed her on the radar of the folks launching Fox Sports 1 in 2013. Ultimately, she landed a spot as one of the mainstays on Crowd Goes Wild!, a sports talk show that was canceled within a year. Nolan was a bright spot, though. In a short video for a web series that she was doing simultaneously, called No Filter with Katie Nolan, she used Ray Rice's domestic violence scandal as an opportunity to criticize not just the NFL, but all of sports media—even her own bosses at Fox—for creating a culture that excluded women from positions of influence or power.
It proved a shrewd workaround—holding the NFL accountable while pointing out that so few women were around to do exactly that—and the clip went viral. It also positioned Nolan as exactly the smart voice that was so missing from the mix. In an age of scorching hot (and first) takes, she seemed authentic. Relatable. Here was someone not afraid to say some shit. It also acted as something of an inflection point, leaving Nolan to reckon with what her brotastic beginnings at Guyism had afforded her: a platform with real influence. If she’d used her status as the “cool girl” to get into the party, now she was stepping out of that Trojan Horse to tell all the sausages at the fest that they should probably retire the phrase “cool girl” from their vocabulary forever.
"I got my job at Guyism by writing a blog about how women suck," says Nolan, about Bitches Can't Hang, a site she ran before doing videos for Guyism. "I look back at that now and I'm like, 'Oh my god.' I was the girl in high school who was like, 'I don't have girlfriends. I only like guys.' Now I'm like, you were just buying into this idea of what a woman is that they defined, and then you perpetuated it by being like, I'm not like them. Well, yeah, you are like them, 'cause you're a woman. So if you're a cool woman, that means women can be cool, unlike what is constantly told to us. So instead of aligning with men against women, you should align with women against men and be like, Not all women like pink and are into reality shows. And I chose the wrong side, and I still am like upset about that. And I'm most upset because it got me a job that I deserve either way, but I got by being mean about women. It sucks."
Recognizing her potential, FS1 rolled her over to a new show called Garbage Time with Katie Nolan. It excelled at creating content that was perfectly snack-sized for consumption on social media—so much so that it won a Sports Emmy for Outstanding Social TV Experience in 2016 (and earned Nolan a huge social media following: 429K Twitter followers, as of this writing). By February of 2017, Nolan was in Houston, hosting a week of hour-long Garbage Time shows live at the Super Bowl. She was rolling and Fox wanted her to sign a new deal, move to L.A., and develop a bigger, longer Garbage Time. She wanted to figure out the show before signing. So Garbage Time ended and, with nine months left on her contract, Nolan was effectively shelved. She spent most of that time in her apartment, playing video games and sometimes writing monologues for a show she didn't have.
It became increasingly obvious that Nolan would leave Fox for ESPN, whose aging bullpen of talent was in need of someone fresh, who could be funny and reach a younger audience, who hopefully wouldn't bloviate so much. She officially signed in October of last year. ESPN quickly found roles for her substituting on daily sports shows, helming SportsCenter on Snapchat, and hosting her podcast Sports? with Katie Nolan. But still, Nolan went largely unseen, leaving people to, as she puts it, “ask what the fuck I've been doing for the last year.”
Always Late is ESPN’s attempt to crack the code and to leverage her audience against the $4.99 a month it costs to stream its service. With new episodes every Wednesday, it’s very much in the vein of John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight but, you know, SPORTS: it features a quick riff on the week’s headlines, followed by a lengthy, joke-y monologue delivered on an issue of more substance, before diving into bits-y segments, often accompanied by guests or athletes. But all of the show’s elements are built around what she has always done best: jokes about the things sports takes way too seriously (mascots, baseball’s “unwritten rules”) and not so gently punching up at the powers responsible for the very serious matters sports takes not at all seriously (domestic assault, gender pay gaps, NCAA student-athletes not being compensated).
Over two conversations—one at the Paris Cafe right before her show launched, and another this week via phone—Nolan talked candidly about how she got here, and maybe more importantly, where she's been.
GQ: On one of your podcast episodes, you're talking about how the NFL's 49ers had to sign Jimmy Garoppolo. You said, "They're the 49ers! People used to love them. And now nobody cares. They became the joke—I see my future in that statement. These teams that do really, really well just become jokes because they can't maintain it.” How scared are you of that actually? I do feel like you've been given so many cool shows that you've done so well—
Katie Nolan: Unh-unh! I've been given one and this is my second one. So don't feed some narrative that I just have a bunch of shows all up in there… For the record, Garbage Time? Not canceled. They wanted to move me out to LA and make it bigger and I didn't trust them and so I left. It was not canceled.
Given is the wrong word. I'm sorry.
[laughs] I know. I clearly have a soft spot because the Internet has been like, "How many shows is this girl gonna get?" It's my second. Have you heard of Michael Ian Black? He's had like 95 fucking shows. God.
I feel like you keep getting cars and no one's giving you room to drive.
I think part of that is my fault… I think that I'm so worried that someone else that isn't as invested in this as I am is going to touch it and fuck it up and they'll just go, Whoops, and go on to their next thing. So I am so protective of all my things. I could have moved [Garbage Time] out to LA, could have grown it to an hour daily show on FS1. Right before I left I went to the Super Bowl and we did my show live, an hour daily from the Super Bowl.
Before we got out there, I said, “Look, we're booking a panel of people to be on this show with me. They need to be people that understand what this show is. I don't want you to get me big name athletes that have no idea who I am or what I do. They're just going to be confused and it's not going to work on the show. I also don't want you to get me a panel of people that all work at Fox. Those are my only two things. I will do whatever else."
The night before the first show live from the Super Bowl they were like, "Such and such missed his flight. So the first show is going to be you, Nick Wright, Cris Carter, two FS1 personalities"—and then a girl I had booked, Sarah Tiana, a very funny comedian. I was like, “Okay, this is going to be a disaster.” They were like, "It's gonna be fine."
Cris Carter brings up Deflategate. I'm like, okay so now I either have to, out of respect for him, let him talk about this on my show or be like, “It's my show. Shut up Cris.” So I chose the second option. We got into it. It was a mess. It wasn't good TV.
I wasn't mad at him, I was mad at the network. Like, "I told you. I know this show better than anyone else. Cris Carter is incredible, but he will not work on this show. It's not going to work for him." They didn't listen. So that was the moment that I was like, I'm not coming back to Fox.
Right before the Super Bowl, they had pitched me: "You'll move out to L.A. You'll have an hour a day. You'll have this time slot. We'll get you a studio. We're going to reformat it." All things that I was like, "This kind of sounds great." Then I went to the Super Bowl. That happened. I was like, that's it. I'm done. I'm leaving. I just didn't trust that I would move my life to L.A. and they would protect it or listen to me about it. They wanted me to sign the deal before we developed the show. That was my sticking point.
They're awesome. I loved my time there... I talked to the people in charge when I left. "I'm going. Let's go on good terms. I'm gonna go. Maybe I come back. Who knows?" So I'm not mad at them in any way. I had to make a call and it's the call I made and I guess we'll see if it's the right one or the wrong one.
"Given" was a very loaded term. Clearly, it struck a chord.
I didn't have a job for, like, a year. That was hard… I had just gone from work, work, work, work, work every day when I was doing those videos and bartending and then I went to TV and I was doing a daily live show. I had not stopped in a long time. I was forced to stop because I didn't want to sign a new deal, and I still had months left on my deal. So I was just waiting. It sucked. I was starting to go nuts.
When you're not making anything you're not in control of the narrative. [People] weren't talking about things I'd done; they were talking about why I wasn't doing things. You see this narrative building. I'm like, “If I don't hurry up and do something there's going to become this narrative that isn't true.”
You say you went nuts. What does that mean?
I have a family history of depression so there may have been a little bit of that. But when you don't leave your house, you don't see a doctor so you don't find out if maybe that's what's really happening.
There were days where I would wake up at 1:00 P.M. and be like, No, and just go back to sleep. That would happen probably twice a month. There were days where people in my life who I love and who love me would be like, "Come hang out," and I'd think about having to answer questions like: “What have you been doing? What's next?" I don't want to have to look people I love in the eye and be like, “How am I spending my time? Um, I've gotten super into video games because they keep me from thinking about anything else and give me a sense of accomplishment because I can feel like when the day started I was only 15 percent done with this game and now it tells me I'm 23 percent, which means I have done 8 percent worth of work today.”
I was embarrassed. I had to deal with if I was a failure, which I've netted out, luckily. I also had to deal with other people being like, "Oh, it's okay. Everything's gonna be fine.” Even though you have good intentions, it feels like “Oh god, you feel too bad to tell me it's not okay.” Then also you have people that are like, "You're getting paid to not work right now. Why are you sad?"
It wasn't cute. This isn't a cute story.
What was the longest you went without leaving your house?
I would say the longest I didn't leave my house was like two weeks. That doesn't even sound that crazy to me. You just raised your eyebrows like that's crazy!
A lot of people have it a lot worse than I have it. It feels really self indulgent to be like, “Man, those seven months where I wasn't working, but was getting a paycheck were really hard.” So I don't want anyone to feel bad for me at all… There are a lot of worse things that could have happened, but that was hard for me in a way that I hadn't experienced yet. I think I'll be a better person for having experienced it because I always thought I needed a better work life balance. I went from overdosing on work to overdosing on life.
There was a moment in there where you said you started to “accept it”—how did you get to that point of acceptance?
Accepting maybe isn't the right word. It was more cope with it, I guess. It wasn't like a: Yup, well here we are. It was more of a: There is a light at the end of the tunnel. My deal was up in November. I knew that no matter what, something was going to happen in November. I knew it was a finite amount of time.
I wrote things down. There was a day—one of the bad days—where I just started making lists. It was the beginning of me climbing out of the hole. I just started writing things down. Things I like. Flipped the page. Names of people I know.
It sounds like a really morbid thing to say, but every day that you work, there's proof you lived. You went out, people saw you. You wrote an article, you did something. For me, it was like I filmed something today or I pitched an idea. [But for those months] it was just like, I didn't even live today. I didn't do anything. If people were to look back at this week of my life, there's nothing to show. I was just writing down on a piece of paper things I wanted to learn more about. And it helped me realize, “Okay cool, you did a thing today. You lived today. There's evidence of you on earth today. Do a little bit more tomorrow.”
Where are those lists now?
Hopefully in the trash, but probably in my house. I have a list next to my bed in my dresser drawer that I made one night—it's going to sound really vain. Please know it was from a place—I needed to help myself. I went through Twitter mentions and found anyone who tweeted, “Where are you? I miss you,” or like, “I wish you were still here,” or, “Scanning the channels looking for Katie.”
There's that period at the beginning where you're missing and people are like, “Where the fuck are you?” There's the period in the middle where people stop asking and that's worse. When nobody notices or cares anymore—that's what hurts more than people being like, “We need you.”
When you say you had bad days, are those the days you just couldn't leave the house? What did that day look like?
There would be days where I would try to do little things to make me feel better. There's a collection of women that work in sports on the internet—we all are kind of in this little collective and I think I probably freaked a couple of them out. [laughs]
This one girl tweeted, "I wish I could get these pair of jeans. I really love these jeans, but they're like $80 and I can't justify it." That day, I Venmo'd her $80 and was like, “Get yourself those jeans. You deserve a thing.” She responded, as she should have, with like, "What the fuck?" [laughs] In my head it was like, in the grand scheme of things, I'm getting a paycheck, I'm not doing any work. I can make her feel happy today, so I want her to be happy. I think her reaction genuinely was like, "I didn't tweet it so that somebody would send me money." I was like, I know, just let me do a nice thing for a person. I haven't done a nice thing for a person in a couple days and it will make me feel better if you have a thing that you want.
To rewind a little bit... What's the most trouble you ever got in as a kid?
When I was a kid my brother and I went to a tile store with my parents, probably three to five [years old]. I must have just learned what it means to moon someone. We were in the aisles of a Tiles Plus on Route 9 in Framingham. I said, "Hey Kevin, look," and I pulled my pants down. My mom was pissed. I had just learned the concept of you can show people your butt and it's funny. So I did that and I was like, "I thought people thought this was funny." She was very mad. It probably didn't help that the front of the store was glass.
Then when I got older, second or third grade, I hit a boy over the head with my backpack at school. I got teased a lot. As a young Italian woman, I had a mustache. So the kids in my school used to try to come up with new nicknames to give me that would hurt. When they would notice it not hurting as much they would come up with a new one. Kids are brilliant like that. They used to call me Freddy Krueger because I was so ugly. Looking back on it, have some more creativity! I didn't have any scars on my face. That didn't make any sense. It just wasn't creative. So when that started wearing off, they started calling me Karl Malone because he had a mustache.
I didn't like it so I hit this kid over the head with my back pack. I had reached a breaking point. They had been mean, mean, mean, mean and then I assaulted someone—sure, whatever. But then I get in trouble? Where were you on all that other shit Principal Whatever-the-fuck-your-name-was?
Outside of hitting classmates with backpacks, what was 10-year-old Katie Nolan like? Don't give me the answer you gave someone else that you had a terrible haircut or whatever.
Have you seen the haircut though? You don't understand. First grade through eighth grade I had a little boy haircut—like a Mary Lou Retton, but less cute.
Was that your choice?
No it was my mom’s choice. My mom thought it gave me character or made me different. What I think now, as an adult, is she knew that would make people not want to have sex with me. [laughs] I told her I was growing it out for high school she was devastated. She used mental manipulation to try and get me to keep it.
After dance recitals people used to come up to me and say, "You are amazing. You are incredible,” which made me think I was a great dancer. [I] told my mom I wanted to grow my hair out. She said, "Okay, but no one's going to come up to you after the dance recital and tell you that they thought you were great." I was like, "They're only doing that because of my hair?" She was like, "Yeah, because all the other girls look exactly the same.” So I kept my hair for a couple more years after she said that. I was like, “Well, I love compliments.”
At 10 I had just won my junior Olympic gold medal, I believe. In 1997.
You had me for five seconds.
I'm not joking. In rhythmic gymnastics.
You're not fucking with me?
Who would pick rhythmic gymnastics to fuck with somebody? It wasn't the real Olympics. It was junior Olympics… When I was a kid I thought that's what I was going to do. I was going to be a professional dancer.
Then I had this part of my life where I was dating a guy in a band. I was like, I'm going to be in the music scene. Then that stopped. Then I figured out who I was and [that I] could just be me as a person, which I know sounds like a stupid thing to realize. But when I liked sports and my band guy friends were all like, "Sports are for jocks. We don't like sports," I was like, “No totally, no yeah they're awful,” and would stay home to watch games because I was embarrassed because my friends didn't like sports.
I feel like my whole life has been trying to get to a point where I am now. Not professionally, just in terms of like, The things I like are the things I like and that's okay. I think it probably took me longer than it took a lot of people. But it's a thing I am happy to have and it's probably why I get really precious about my life now. I like it the way it is and I liked to protect it.
How and when did you get into writing?
I loved writing in school. I wasn't conscious of like, "I want to be on TV." But when I was little, we got one of those—remember in Home Alone where he gets the Talkboy? You could record yourself talking on a cassette tape into a microphone. So I used to make fake radio shows on that. They still exist somewhere, and I have to find them and burn them. But I would do that. That was fun to me.
I was principal for the day at school once. I won a contest, and I was so happy because I got to do the morning announcements. I could be the person that was on the microphone and got to tell everybody what was happening. It was like my favorite thing in the world. And what did it mean? Literally nothing. But looking back on it, it makes sense now.
What did your parents do?
My mom was a bartender. She went to school to be a speech pathologist. She did that for a while, and then got pregnant with my brother. And my dad was an accountant for Raytheon. So it was like, "Well, one of us has to be home with the kids," so she quit her job and got a night job. She was a bartender for probably like 20 years. She was incredible at it. I started liking sports because my mom would listen to sports radio because she's like, "It'll help me get more tips. If I can talk to the customers about sports, they'll like me more. So I like sports now." And I was like, "Okay, I like sports now too," 'cause I wanted my mom to like me. She was the coolest. She always had the funniest thing to say.
[She's also] sarcastic as hell, so my comedy tend towards negative. And I hate that. I think it's the easiest crutch to make fun of people as a joke. So, my work around if I'm going to do that, I make sure to do it about me instead of about another person. If I'm going to say something bad about someone, it's usually just me, cause I’ve got a lot to work through. And it's cheaper than therapy, so I just work through it on TV. It's like therapy they pay me to go to.
When you were doing those Guyism videos, you were coming home from the bar and doing them?
For the first year, I was coming home and doing them because I wanted the money. Then, I'm the kind of person that if I start doing something and I see other people are doing it better, I'm like, "Okay, how do I do it like they do it?"
I was like, "Guys, we're never going to do good numbers. Other people are doing what we do with production value." So I bought a camcorder, 'cause I didn't know shit about shit. I should've gotten like a nice camera, but I was like, "Video cameras look like this." I bought a tripod, I bought a green screen. I watched YouTube videos that taught me how to use a green screen. For Christmas, I was like, "Get me lighting stuff, get me camera equipment, get me editing software." My family was like, "This feels lame." I'm like, "It's important." [laughs]
I taught myself Final Cut Pro and by the second year, I quit my job and was like, "I'm going to devote all my time to this.” My family was like, "They don't pay you that much money for this to matter," but I guess I just was like, "Why would I do something shitty when I could do something cool?"
That drive seems rare, though.
It's rare because we've probably evolved from this line of thinking: "I'm going to do this and make it great no matter how little money it pays me or what little light at the end of the tunnel there is." Why did I have a drive to make things? Because I want people to like me. I think every person can be boiled down to this shitty thing that is what drives them. I think mine is like, "Man, I just want everybody to think I'm cool," because no one did.
You gotta just stop and be happy, but I don't really do that. I either stop and be devastatingly sad or I don't stop. I have go and sad, those are my two speeds. [laughs] If I stop, I'll realize how sad I am. Ooh! I gotta find a new therapist.
I have a good therapist. Want a recommendation?
Is it a guy?... My brain just goes to like, I'm conditioned to make men happy. It's what we've always been taught: "Well, don't make the men upset." I want a woman so that I can be like, "Look, here's my deepest, darkest blah, and if you judge me, that's okay 'cause you're a woman." If it's a guy, I feel like, "Oh my god, you're judging me. You're going to tell all the other guys at the meeting, and then nobody's gonna ... " It's gross. It's toxic.
If you would go back and watch some of your early stuff now, how would you feel about it?
I look back at old things I did and I'm like, Uh, why did you do that? And I know this is very pie-in-the-sky optimistic of me, but I think that if you look back at old things you did and you love [all of] them, then you haven't grown or changed in any way. I've spent a lot of time unpacking how I got here and things I used to say, and did I do that wrong, or should I have done this in a better way, and why did I ever think that? Then I just remember that I was young and learning on the fly.
How much pressure do you feel to have Always Late be a success, after all of this?
I'm very scared. It's probably why I'm like, "We don't have to promote the show that much. Let me just try a little for the people who know me and like me and once it gets good we can promote it." I've learned that sometimes I gotta just chill out. Sometimes I have to be like, It's going to be as good as it's going to be. Put it out there.
The amount of time I put into finding the people I wanted to work with me on this show was not an accident. I like making it. That's the part I like. Now I have this team of people that I spent a lot of time finding... They're excited and they're exciting and I need that energy because I need to be brought back to where I was before, which was like constantly ready to go.
Now I have a team to get me back there. They believe in it. They're excited about it. The world is a different place now than it was the last time I was making a TV show with my name on it. People are looking for a thing you say to use against you to get you fired, to drag you on Twitter. I just keep telling myself to make a show that I like and that my team likes—and if other people don't like it, at least you have that.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
