The AFL Footy Show has commanded a loyal television audience every week for more than two decades, been nominated for the Logie Award for most popular sports program every year since 1996 and won on eight occasions. By every measure in commercial television, it excels.
And once upon a time - if you can even imagine this is possible - it was actually considered the smarter and more substantial football panel show, talking seriously about sport while its NRL cousin was a pantomime of wigs, change-room boofery and smut.
My, how the world pivots on a penny. And a bad one at that.
For a week now, debate has ranged over the issue of Collingwood president Eddie McGuire, North Melbourne president James Brayshaw and former Richmond coach Danny Frawley making inappropriate remarks about The Age's AFL writer Caroline Wilson.
Now The Footy Show's Sam Newman has doubled down on that issue, saying it was Wilson who was the "embarrassment" and that critics of Eddie McGuire - in whose wake, to be fair to Newman, he has slavishly spent much of his TV shelf life - were "excrement".
Setting aside for a moment the bigger issue - that the prime minister can can weigh in with "there is no place for disrespecting women", while his government sponsors detention camps where more tangible violence against women seems to be the norm - there is plainly a problem here.
It is a cultural problem, and it is twofold. Broadly speaking, there is a problem with entrenched misogyny in Australia's sporting culture. Incidents such as this, where offensive behaviour is normalised and apologies are only offered when media bushfires are lit, are too frequent for that not to be the case.
And, in more specific terms, there is a problem with what is considered acceptable at the Nine Network, a commercial television enterprise which has, for too long, sponsored this kind of drivel, and supported people such as Newman, hoping to have its ratings cake and eat it, too.
A television network cannot, for all these years, fund and encourage a program which has repeatedly tested the boundary of offensive behaviour, and escape the plain truth that it alone is responsible for it, even as they indulge in their scripted shaking of the head, and the "gosh, what will Sam say next?" incredulity they hide behind.
Cast your mind back to the time Newman painted himself in blackface to mock indigenous footballer Nicky Winmar. Or when he compared a Malaysian man to a monkey, and - stunningly - was defended at the time by Nine, who claimed it was "irreverent" satire. Or the time he exposed himself on national television.
Then there was the time Newman referred to Melbourne's gay community as "mincing, lisping, parading people". The time he said a gay footballer kissing his boyfriend was "annoyingly gratuitous". And the time, back in 2008, Newman pasted a photo of Caroline Wilson's face onto a lingerie-wearing mannequin in a stunt Wilson described as "degrading, humiliating and insulting".
What it leaves you wondering is this: if the BBC can sack Jeremy Clarkson, whose commercial value is far greater than Newman's, for punching a producer over the pressing issue of a hot dinner, just what does it take to be sacked from Australia's oldest, and for much of its life, most watched, television network?
In some respects The AFL Footy Show is merely reflective of the a broader television culture, where nasty and cheap is the new normal. In purely commercial terms, we should perhaps be congratulating them for their trailblazing work in the race to the bottom.
But Sam Newman is nonetheless, in commercial television terms, an anachronistic throwback to the Jurassic era. But dropping him would do little to address the deeper cultural issues in play.
For most of its life Channel Nine has swaggered across the broadcasting landscape, a slightly overfed, slightly overpaid metaphor for the men who built it.
But, as it reels from the scandal of sponsoring the abduction of children in the name of journalism, some tough questions need to be asked, about what kind of company it wants to be, and about what kind of values it wants its brand to represent to the broader community.
