Rob Lowe has been a prominent DirecTV spokesman, but he’s also a big football fan, and the latter role appears to be taking precedence for him at the moment. Lowe absolutely unleashed on DirecTV in a tweet barrage Saturday:

@FOXTV and @DIRECTV have blocked out the #SEAvsATL game in my area. Stop the greed and let the fans see the game!! WTF?!! — Rob Lowe (@RobLowe) January 14, 2017

https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/820357083765698560

https://twitter.com/RobLowe/status/820359981736153088

What’s at issue here? It looks like it’s a carriage dispute between DirecTV and multiple Palm Springs, CA-area local television stations. From The Desert Sun:

DirecTV has pulled the plug on at least eight local television stations in the Coachella Valley, after the provider and those stations failed to renegotiate carrier agreements.

The stations were initially scheduled to go off the air on Tuesday, but the parties agreed to two 24-hour extensions before “reaching an impasse” on Thursday, said Mike Stutz, general manager at KESQ, one of the affected stations. According to KESQ and its parent company, The News-Press and Gazette Company, DirecTV customers were scheduled to lose KESQ (ABC), KDFX (FOX), KUNA (Telemundo), CBS Local 2, KCWQ (CW), Desert News Now, KUNA-FM and KESQ-AM when their existing contract expired on Tuesday. After two extensions, the stations went off the air at 3 p.m. Thursday.

Those stations carry local news and weather programming, local and national sports — including National Football League playoffs — and network television shows.

A carriage dispute that disrupts the NFL playoffs? Yikes. And they certainly picked the wrong personality to mess with, as Lowe’s been the most frequent figure advertising DirecTV:



Maybe this leads to Lowe switching sides and doing ads for a different provider, a la the formerly-Verizon “Can you hear me now” guy who’s now shilling for Sprint. Or maybe he’ll go full Mitchard Grinder on them and destroy them with a passionate courtroom speech. Either way, we certainly saw Angry Rob Lowe here (or perhaps even Meathead Rob Lowe, seen above?), and it was literally perfect. Don’t be like this Rob Lowe, DirecTV; give the man his football back.

[Rob Lowe on Twitter]