The George Michael Sports Machine was a syndicated, sports-related American television program which was launched in 1984. The show aired weekends, usually on Sunday nights, and originated from WRC-TV in Washington, D.C., one of NBC's owned and operated stations. Most of the stations that aired The Sports Machine were NBC affiliates. The show was an offshoot of a local program that George Michael, a former disc jockey who became a sportscaster, hosted in Washington beginning in 1980. Michael hosted the program for its entire run, which ended in 2007. Lindsay Czarniak, who was a colleague of Michael's at WRC-TV, joined the program as a substitute host in 2004 and became Michael's co-host in 2006. History 1984–2004 Shortly after Michael joined WRC-TV in 1980, the station launched the program as George Michael's Sports Final, a local sports wrapup show on Sunday evenings, following the late newscast. After a successful four-year run in Washington, NBC's other owned-and-operated stations—at the time in New York City, Los Angeles, Cleveland, and Chicago—added the program to their Sunday late-night schedules, and it was retitled as The George Michael Sports Machine. NBC concurrently began to offer the program to its affiliated stations as part of the network schedule on September 2, 1984; WRC-TV, which continued to produce Sports Machine, said that this was the first time that a network had carried a locally-produced sports show (albeit one with a national focus). In 1991, ITC Entertainment took Sports Machine into wider national syndication; at the time, the program was carried on 84 of NBC's affiliates. The show moved to Group W Productions in 1995; its successors, Eyemark Entertainment and King World Productions (both now CBS Media Ventures), continued to distribute Sports Machine until 2001, when NBC Enterprises (later NBCUniversal Television Distribution from 2004 until the show's final episode in 2007) began distributing the program. As host, George Michael presented clips from the weekend's sporting events from across the United States and sometimes outside of the U.S. Unlike newer sports-related programming, Sports Machine did not usually present commentary or criticism and focused almost purely on the highlights, and, often toward the end of the show, an in-depth story about a particular athlete. The show was also somewhat unusual in its occasional coverage of remarkable high school sports footage, and its occasional coverage of sports largely ignored by most other sports wrap-up shows, such as ice hockey, NASCAR and other