Can Katie Nolan Help Save Fox Sports 1?

Katie Nolan would like a picture of her face embossed on a bottle of liquor. "That's how you know you've made it," she says. "A nice Maker's Mark. Maybe a Bulleit Bourbon."

Nolan, 28, offers this thought while sitting on a chair in the office of Michael Davies, the president and CEO of Embassy Row, a production studio on Hudson Street in Manhattan where her new show, "Garbage Time," is filmed. Davies, whose mug appears on a remarkable number of bottles in his well-stocked bar, has made it. Nolan, with a shiny new Sunday 9:30 p.m. time slot on Fox Sports 1 (FS1), is on her way.

A year and a half ago, Fox executives plucked Nolan from relative obscurity—she hosted a video series called "Guyism Speed Round"—and installed her as a digital correspondent on "The Crowd Goes Wild," the fledging network's attempt to create a funny, irreverent sports/comedy hybrid headlined by Regis Philbin. Nolan was quickly promoted to panelist as it became clear that her girl-next-door persona resonated with the viewers. "Television, for all its electricity, is a very cautious business," Jason Gay, a "CGW" panelist says. "Katie is the opposite of that, and it's what people like."

Chris Spags, the founder of Guyism.com, agrees. "She has the same avant-garde attitude that a lot of the Masshole types have," he says of the Framingham, Massachusetts native, who he recruited to the men's site after reading her blog, Bitches Can't Hang. "They don't take shit from anyone. They are unafraid."

While Nolan is quick and funny, chances are that if you ware familiar with her, it's due to a serious moment that went viral. There was the time she defended Philbin from Rick Reilly, went after Mike Francesa, called out Peter King, and, in the best-known example, attacked the NFL's treatment of women. These bits transcended the FS1 and FoxSports.com silos and entered the broader media debate. They helped raise her profile to the point where she nearly got traded to ESPN despite the fact that "CGW" lasted just nine months.

"Garbage Time" is conceived of as an extension of Nolan's personality, a mix of sports, humor, and general awareness about the internet and the wider world. One ideal segment might feature Nolan on a candlelit date talking sports with Lebowski-esque New Orleans Saints defensive coordinator Rob Ryan, on whom she has a—joking?—crush. "We could put his face on a bottle of Chambord," she says laughing. "He would work with the rounded bottle." She might play pop-a-shot, a game the former bartender excels in, with Chris Paul, while asking him questions about Lob City.

But the reality doesn't yet match the ambition. "Garbage Time" shoots in a space so small that there isn't room for a cameraman; Nolan will operate the camera by remote. Adam Carolla will appear prominently in the first episode. She and a blogger or other internet personality will debate an issue at length, maybe coming to a consensus, maybe not, but hopefully reaching levels of nuance and intelligence that are absent from the Stephen A. Smith-Skip Bayless screamfests. It's a show aimed at Nolan's people: young, pop culture savvy, tired of hot takes. "I don't think there's a voice on TV that really speaks to that group," she says in Davies's office where she's wearing a simple orange sweater, jeans, black boots, and oversized glasses. "I think we all need a show."

Whether it works or not is another matter. While FS1 executives talk about "finding the show that showcases Katie's talents" and various other corporate talking points, both the suits and the "Garbage Time" staff, which consists of Nolan and three producers, are keeping expectations low. This is partially a function of the subject matter—to examine the history of sports/comedy shows is to find a minefield of failure—but also because there isn't much riding on the outcome. "It's not adding much money to the budget," Nolan says, nodding in the direction of the tiny, unfinished set in the other room where the paint is still drying. "I see myself as an experiment in the Fox Sports bubble. If it works, cool. If it doesn't work, we didn't lose much." FS1 had Nolan on contract making web videos, so why not see if she could carry a show, too?

The fact is that viewers will tune into FS1 based on the strength of its live programming, which is to say the sports it carries. The company knows this, having spent more than $9 billion on rights since 2010 on events including Major League Baseball, NASCAR, the FIFA World Cup, the FIFA Women's World Cup, and Big Ten Football. While viewership for the MLB playoffs reached into the millions, numbers provided by Horizon Media research director Brad Adgate show that the network averaged just 233,000 viewers in primetime between last March 2014 and January 2015. That's better than NBCSN (226,000), but well behind ESPN (1,762,000) and ESPN2 (363,000).

"Garbage Time" is a play at creating a show on the cheap that people might stay around to see. It will air after the Sunday night Major League Soccer games, which drew 268,000 viewers during the season debut. Nolan will be happy to maintain that audience, which skews younger and more internet-savvy than for some other sports. "I don't have enough faith in me personally to think that I will draw in a huge crowd," she says. "My goal is to keep the people who are watching there. Then maybe over time start to grow and grab people."

She should also appeal to a generation of consumers untethered to traditional television. The 18-34 year old set might choose to watch "Game of Thrones" instead of "Garbage Time," but perhaps they'll DVR it to view later, or find one of Nolan's bits as it zooms around social media. Steve Burke, CEO of NBC Universal, said that 70 percent of "Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon" views occur online, and FS1 would likely be pleased with that ratio, even if those views are difficult if not impossible to monetize.

Nolan, who rose quickly in the mainstream media sense but spent two years making daily videos that no one watched after getting home from her bartending shift at 1 a.m., understands how the internet works. The obvious question is whether she will feel added pressure to create viral hits now that she has her own show. She says she won't "sit down and say 'I need to take a stance on something today," and that when something goes wide, she might not do much to further promote it. She turned down every interview request and guest appearance following the Ray Rice piece, content that she had said her bit and felt fine stepping back.

"Pretty much what you see on TV is her in person," Paul Carew, who worked with her at the White Horse Tavern in Boston before she got famous, says. "If people were hitting on her and kind of creeping her out, she gave it back to them. If they talked trash, she could definitely talk it back." Nolan is the type of person who volunteers that her stoned mom cracked up while looking at a creepy slideshow of Nolan's pilfered Instagrams on a random website, who remembers that Philbin drinks vodka tonics with an extra tonic back, and who isn't afraid to say that no, she's really not sure what FS1 wants from her new show.

That honesty might get her in trouble. It also might get her face on a liquor bottle someday.