They’re not athletes. In fact, they look conspicuously unhealthy. But there they sit, poker players, on ESPN, displacing dunks and diving catches with stationary bluffs and rolling raises. And there we sit, in significant numbers, watching.

Poker has exploded — in card clubs, in dorm rooms, across kitchen tables, but nowhere more visibly than on cable television, where poker tournaments, with or without celebrities, are pulling heavy ratings. And poker players, sporting the casino casual dress that passes for a poker “uniform” (T-shirt, baseball hat, sunglasses, facial hair, open-shirt tan-and-bling) are the unlikely new stars of sports TV.

“We’re primarily a sports network, so for us to go into the drama space, we had to have the highest possible production quality.”

“It’s everywhere, that’s for sure, but it came out of nowhere,” says Will Staeger, executive producer of original entertainment programming for sports cable network ESPN, headquartered in Bristol, Connecticut. “We decided a few years ago to take over the production of ‘The World Series of Poker’ and put in graphics and certain camera angles that let you see the hole cards. That made a big difference in popularizing it, but who saw this coming?”

And who sees where’s it’s going next? Staeger, whose own brother now plays poker semi-professionally, is raising ESPN’s bet on the continued viability of televised Texas Hold’em. Besides expanding airtime for “The World Series of Poker,” ESPN recently aired “TILT,” a 9-episode scripted dramatic series that pushes several story arcs — including the efforts of various upstart players and the FBI to take down fictional poker legend Don “The Matador” Everest (actor Michael Madsen) — toward an inevitable showdown at a dramatically heightened but credibly staged World Series of Poker.

Ante Up

Given the critical and ratings success of “PLAYMAKERS,” ESPN’s first ever dramatic series, which explored all sides of the life of professional football players (including the underside),“TILT” was a logical programming play. If “PLAYMAKERS,” a sports drama, could succeed on ESPN, whose bread-and-butter shows are chiefly live sports and sports news, Staeger reasoned that a wide-camera look at world of tournament poker might fly with his audience.

But Staeger, a novelist as well as a producer, understood that the show would be only as good as its content, requiring believable poker exchanges that were not only tightly written but highly-produced. So he engaged Brian Koppelman and David Levien, the writers of the well-regarded, poker-themed film “Rounders,” to write “TILT,” while drafting top acting talent, such as Michael Madsen (“Reservoir Dogs”), to deliver the lines and read the tells.

Leveraged Look

To achieve the high-production look they’d projected for the series, Staeger’s team decided to shoot the show on Sony Cinealta High Definition cameras in 1080/24 frame progressive. “It looks for all intents and purposes like 35mm film, but of course it’s shot on high-definition tape,” he says.

But to carry the full effects of high definition footage to air, Staeger needed a reasonably priced postproduction solution that could generate a Hollywood look on a cable TV budget.

“We’re primarily a sports network, so for us to go into the drama space, we had to have the highest possible production quality,” says Staeger. “We knew we could never spend what ‘The Sopranos’ or what ‘CSI’ spends. But since this is a brand shift for us, and we’re trying to educate audiences that ESPN is a destination for this kind of programming, we needed to give them as good as or better than what they can find elsewhere.”

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