There is no failure like televised failure. It is the most public failure. The most humbling failure. So it was odd when the two men who had assembled the biggest bomb in TV history began high-fiving on the sidelines of the XFL’s final game.

Not everyone was celebrating. Dick Butkus bristled. Jesse Ventura just wanted it all to end. And the general public couldn’t wait to watch something else.

Brett Forrest’s Long Bomb is the story of what really happened in the XFL, the renegade football league dreamed up by NBC and the World Wrestling Federation. Reporting on the XFL from its first training camp to the championship game, Forrest takes us inside the limousines and locker rooms to deliver the dope that NBC’s all-access cameras only promised. When NBC lost TV rights to the NFL, sports chief Dick Ebersol was prepared to do anything to get football back under his wing. Vince McMahon, at the apex of his powers with the WWF, wanted to prove that he was more than a wrestling promoter. By combining football, wrestling, and reality TV, the two men planned to reinvent the way America watched sports.

The XFL promised as much to its players as it did to its viewers. Set in Las Vegas, the audiobook follows the Outlaws and the league’s biggest star, Rod Smart. His nickname, He Hate Me, was the one thing that worked in the XFL.

Forrest deconstructs this moment-in-time experiment. A combination of desperation and hubris, the XFL reflected a confused media landscape, where the cost of airing big games ran too high in a wilderness of splintered audiences and expanding choices.The XFL was supposed to be greater, bigger, better—more, more, more. If it worked, competing networks would have fallen over each other copying the formula. If it didn’t work, man, what a train wreck.