If you’ve ever watched ESPN’s First Take, you know its hosts can get pretty riled up over a good sports debate. The network is now giving fans a chance to share their opinions with Stephen A. Smith, Max Kellerman and Molly Qerim in new Facebook series, First Take: Your Take.
The new show will stream three times a week (Monday, Wednesday and Friday) at 3PM ET on the show’s Facebook Watch page, debuting Monday, January 29th. The series will feature the same host trio as the normal TV broadcast, encouraging fans to record their own hot takes on the topic of the day. Producers will then select the best and one fan will be chosen to debate Smith and Kellerman on each week’s final show.
Facebook is paying ESPN to exclusively license the show for six months, according to Variety.
“We wanted this to be highly interactive, that really was the goal,” said Ryan Spoon, ESPN’s SVP of social and digital content. “It’s one thing to have great reach, but that’s more powerful when that reach comes with engagement and interaction.”
The Monday episode will be a traditional studio-style segment with the “First Take” crew, who will ask fans to share their views and opinions on a topic and upload the video to Facebook. On Wednesdays, the show will be an edited segment of video from the “First Take” team that includes segments of the videos uploaded by viewers. At the end of the show, the fans whose videos were included will be told to check Facebook Messenger, through which one of them will be contacted and asked to square off for the Friday episode in a debate with one of the First Take hosts.
