The final “Chuck and Chernoff” show Tuesday felt a little bit like a going away party for a longtime neighbor.
On 93.7/680 The Fan airwaves, there were moments of gratitude and reflection, a string of guests, laughter over memories from years ago and, while coated in the back-and-forth that defined the show, the realization this was really it.
“There will be some real human emotion before we’re done?” Matt Chernoff inquired of co-host Chuck Oliver at one point.
“Oh, at 4:10,” Oliver responded. “I have emotion at 4:10.”
It was a last taste of the dynamic that gave the show life since its inception since the 2000s on now-defunct 790 The Zone, the smart-aleck Chernoff and his nerdy buddy, Oliver. They created a radio home that was excellent and unique, one that was at turns irreverent, insightful and laugh-out-loud funny. It poked fun at itself, doing things like introducing segments with self-produced songs that very much sounded like it.
When Atlanta-based agent Hadley Engelhard made his regular appearances, he was introduced with a parody of Kenny Chesney’s “You Had Me from Hello.”
“Matt wanted some production/Here we go/It’s You Hadley from hello.”
But the show also brought on noteworthy guests (such as Hall of Famer Chipper Jones, a regular listener) and gave its audience original and informed opinions and analysis of the teams, athletes and coaches in Atlanta and Georgia while dabbling in culture, random news and the hosts’ personal lives.
Show producer Cullen Madden called it “anti-sports radio while sometimes being a sports radio show, if that makes sense.”
Like that longtime neighbor, it won’t be forgotten by listeners across Atlanta and beyond.
“Love you guys and going to miss it,” Jones said as he closed his guest appearance. “Hopefully, the next product is just as good, but we’ll see.”
Chernoff laughed heartily at Jones’ skepticism. Surely, listeners laughed along with him.
The show reached its end point because Oliver decided he could no longer devote himself to two daily shows, the four-hour “Chuck and Chernoff” and the two-hour “Chuck Oliver Show,” the latter focused on his expertise and passion, college football. He had carried double duty for more than 10 years.
Oliver will focus on growing his show, heard across the Southeast, including on 680. On Aug. 31, Chernoff will begin a new afternoon show with John Kincade, the former Fan personality who for the past six years has worked at a station in Philadelphia, his hometown.
It rarely happens in radio that shows last this long or go out on their own terms. It speaks to the quality Oliver and Chernoff delivered.
“You never know what’s going to make a mark,” Chernoff told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution minutes after going off the air. “You never know what’s going to be remembered. I don’t know how it happened, but I’m very blessed that we got to do it together for so long.”
It has brought small joys to listeners for more than two decades, generating loyalty that was reflected in ratings. They were initially paired in 2000 at 790 on a weekend show, Chernoff said. They later teamed with former Falcon Chuck Smith.
Chernoff parted with 790 in 2007, was hired at The Fan in 2008, and Oliver followed shortly after, and the two were paired again. They first had a midday show and then were shifted to drive time in 2011, where they stayed.
It worked for various reasons. Both grew up in metro Atlanta — Oliver graduated from Central Gwinnett and Chernoff from Dunwoody. Their shared passion and historical knowledge of Atlanta’s teams and their agony over their many shortcomings were genuine.
The magic of the show was the chemistry between the two hosts — Chernoff needling the put-upon Oliver — and its mix of knowledgeable and generally lighthearted sports talk with segments that had nothing to do with sports.
“I am a big sports fan, but I’m not an X’s and O’s guy, and I don’t get into half the data that you hear,” Jimmy Baron, the former longtime Atlanta morning show host of note, said on Tuesday’s show. “But you guys are interesting. You guys are fun.”
Possibly the most popular feature was “Win Chuck’s Dinner,” a weekly contest in which callers took on Oliver in trivia contests to win gift cards to local restaurants, a segment livened by Oliver’s pompous air as he consistently defeated callers.
“I said when we did this show, we can do the sports stuff and I’m proud of that,” Chernoff said in his on-air goodbye. “But I hoped we would give you a laugh every day. Sometimes we came up short, sometimes we hit a home run with it. But if we walked out of here because we laughed, I hope everybody enjoyed that part of it, because that was a big deal to us.”
A singular chapter in Atlanta radio closes. The laughter will be missed.
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