We're all familiar with historic match-fixing scandals in esports, but now they'll be getting primetime treatment on CBS' Bull, which is set to feature an episode dedicated to esports.

Bull is a crime drama about a trial scientist named Jason Bull and is based on the early career of Phil McGraw, better known as Dr. Phil, and their esports-laden episode features a client who is accused of throwing a championship game and seeks to clear his name. Gaming personality Morgan Webb and Dota 2 caster Kevin "Purge" Godec will be featured in the episode, which will air on CBS on Feb. 7 at 9 p.m. ET.

theScore esports sat down with executive producer Mark Goffman, in order to flesh out more about the episode, the involvement of the esports personalities, and where he sees esports heading in the entertainment industry.

Tell me about yourself and connection to esports if any - as a fan etc.

I'll start by saying I have an art director that I worked with a while ago that's a phenomenal talent named Michael Murguia, and he kept telling me [about] his brother, who was an art director for League of Legends for Riot, and that I had to go check out the stuff they're doing over at Santa Monica. It's really cool and I'm like, 'yeah, yeah, esports, I'll get to it one day.' But I was pretty busy writing and working. I played but I never got into it much as a spectator sport. And then I went down to Riot and I was just blown away. When I saw not just the size of what they do but the art and the inspiration for the champions, and the enthusiasm of the players, and the people who work there, I was like 'oh my God, I gotta find out more' so I kinda immersed myself in the world. This year I was invited to the championship at the Staples Centre, and it was a spectacle beyond what I could've imagined. When they said that this is the biggest sport no one's ever heard of, I thought 'Well that's it, that's perfect for a television show.'

This show is a law drama, yet esports is an incredibly unregulated community in the wider scheme of things. Does that appeal to your show and writers, that it can grant you creative liberties on what you wanted to write about?

It became a lot of fun to delve into what are the rules and what's the gaming like? Just as the early 1900s baseball, they didn't have all the rules written and they had game-fixing, and players being taken advantage of in certain ways, and what is it like now for players and owners for these teams? An esports team could be sold for 20-30 million dollars and that's pretty incredible, and we see a lot of NFL owners and major owners buying into esports. We were able to create our own fictitious gamerverse, but playing on the current state of rules and regulations of it. There are no team rules and regulations necessarily. There aren't unions for teams and players. You can have something like players being pressured into certain types of contracts, and things like what is considered a neuro-enhancer or doping in these leagues. All those are really fun and interesting questions that we have distilled into this episode in which we just started with this simple concept of "let's take the No. 1 player of one of these games and have him accused of tanking a match, and what does that do? what is it worth? How does that affect his team? And what does it do to the owner, and how does this play out in the court? And having this play into the traditional trial setting was really a lot of fun.

What made esports a tantalizing vehicle to tell the story you wanted? Why an esports episode?

Well, on Bull, we start with characters. What is a fascinating character that we can explore that will hold people's attention for an hour? Who was somebody who Bull would find fascinating and wanna learn more about him and wanna spend time with? What does it take to be a pro athlete, to be number one? We started talking about everybody from Lance Armstrong to Peyton Manning, and then we sorted landed on, 'you know what would be novel?' is if we went into the world of esports because it's sort of a dawn of a new era of sports, and not as many people know about it, so it really seem fresh. I shared my experiences and got two writers, one who is a huge gamer, and they co-wrote this brilliant episode together.

We work hard to have really exciting characters. one of the things that was really exciting in this episode is to show Cable's involvement in playing video games, and that she had an ex that broke up with her over a game. Basically, to show all the different characters and how much they're affected by playing games was really fun.

What was it like to have Morgan Webb and Kevin "Purge" Godec there to cameo? Were they helpful at all?

We do have great cameos by Morgan Webb and Purge and we were authentic with their shoutcasting. The aura of authenticity is there, they helped keep us in check for this entire episode.

How does the wider entertainment industry view esports at the moment?

I can speak for myself here, and this is what I incorporated into the character of Bull. Any event or activity that captures the hearts and minds of hundreds of millions of people is worthy of our attention. Bull completely realizes that this is the future; that entertainment can be passive like reading a novel, or active like the games, and what's interesting now is that esports or video game spectator sports has gotten to the point in the last few years where people have perked up. It's not just an episode of television, it is the future. Also, personally, I love all incorporations of technology and new media into the film/television industry.

So far we've seen drama and mystery take on esports. What's the next genre that this growing industry fits into for film/TV?

We're doing a great trial that exposes different areas of the sports aspect, but I think there's an incredible drama, a field of dreams type film you could do. The beauty of it is, the future is your imagination with this. For example, in League of Legends, these champions and the world they've created are nearly as well-built out as like a Game of Thrones or other types of fantasy worlds, and they would be ripe for feature films and television series.

From your perspective, what is the next step for the esports industry itself? It currently fills stadiums and has millions of viewers, does it need to ally with film and television to grow more?

I think that they'll come together in the same way that many other sports are a fantastic entertainment. Esports events being that large and impactful across the spectrum of audiences, people who have now grown up playing games and continue to play as they get older, you're going to see that become a mainstream and very accepted form of entertainment just like watching television or going to the movies. The industries are going to converge, I think as the two corporations will realize the synergies they have.

Gabriel Zoltan-Johan is a News Editor at theScore esports and the head analyst for the University of Toronto League of Legends team. His (public) musings can be found on his Twitter.