‘We stole the Super Bowl audience’: how In Living Color pulled off the greatest heist in US TV history | US television

WWhen the NFL announced Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny as this year’s Super Bowl halftime headliner, it embarked on a culture war. Right-wing critics have raged against the musician’s nonconforming style, Spanish-language music and anti-Maga politics. Donald Trump, after saying he had never heard of Bad Bunny, called the choice of headliner “absolutely ridiculous.”

In response, Erika Kirk and her conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA turned the controversy into its own counterprogramming event: the All-American Halftime Show. After announcing his Kid Rock-led Nashville lineup Monday, Vice President JD Vance was the first among conservatives to enthusiastically spread the word.

Overall, the alternative casting is meant to be Turning Point’s most provocative move yet, a major middle finger to left-wing values ​​— and maybe it would be if one of television’s blackest shows hadn’t gotten it right first and best. “We stole the audience,” actor Marlon Wayans said recently. “And the next year, they were like, ‘You never do anything that Again.'”

In 1990, a new sketch comedy called In Living Color appeared on the then-nascent Fox network. Riding the momentum of a film career that included writing and producing credits on Eddie Murphy Raw, In Living Color creator Keenen Ivory Wayans placed the show in SNL’s blind spot, highlighting black culture, ethnic nuances and queer sensibilities with a fearless, streetwise twist. The cast of In Living Color was a photo negative of typical SNL programming – a mix of future stars (Jamie Foxx, David Alan Grier), members of the Wayans family (Marlon and Damon, an SNL castoff), and DEI hires (Jim Carrey); Jennifer Lopez got her start in showbiz as a dancer in the Fly Girls.

In Living Color, the sketches didn’t just land; they became national refrains that echoed through breakrooms and schoolyards, perhaps the most inescapable being Damon Wayans’ angry clown punchline: “Homie, don’t play that.” The show was a vanguard of rap, booking Public Enemy, Queen Latifah and other hip-hop acts at a time when the big three networks were still wary of young black artists.

Keenen’s SNL bizarro quickly became as big as its inspiration, attracting 12 million viewers a week on prime-time Sundays – a major night of television at the time. But of course, it wasn’t as watched as the NFL, a television property that Fox honcho Rupert Murdoch desperately wanted for his fledgling channel.

During the first season of In Living Color, a marketing impresario named Jay Coleman approached Fox with an idea that would attract even larger audiences. And stick to CBS, the NFL rights holder and Super Bowl carrier that Murdoch had his sights set on: a special episode of In Living Color that would air opposite the Super Bowl intermission.

The Super Bowl halftime spectacular was then ripe for the picking – “the moment where everyone was going to pee,” as Keenen told ESPN in 2021. “They’re creating a halftime show for the 100,000 people in the stadium that I don’t think translates very well to the small screen,” Coleman said in 1991. Worse still, the performances were deadly boring – a hodgepodge of dusty, earnest acts of nostalgia. fanfares, preceded by a monotonous speech from the NFL commissioner. “I don’t know anyone who likes the halftime show, except the parents of the kids who march on the field,” Keenen said in an interview with the LA Times in 1992, before his wartime broadcast.

The 1992 Super Bowl halftime theme was “The Magic of Winter” – an ode to the upcoming Winter Olympics in Albertville, France. The highlight of the show was a figure skating routine between American sweethearts Dorothy Hamill and Brian Boitano to live music by – wait for it – Gloria Estefan. “Why would you want to feature a singer from the Miami Sound Machine in a show called “Winter Magic”? a Hartford Courant critic later asked.

In Living Color promised not only more frisky production – live and recorded sketches, Color Me Badd singing their monster R&B hit I Wanna Sex You Up – but also reduced prices for advertisers. Frito-Lay paid $2 million for the exclusive rights to In Living Color’s Super Bowl halftime show, an amount that would have barely covered a 75-second commercial on the CBS television broadcast. “Cute” is how George F Schweitzer, a CBS executive, described Fox’s Super Bowl subterfuge, saying it would only “appeal to the people who watch In Living Color.”

The country found out how wrong Schweitzer was on January 26, 1992, when Buffalo met Washington at the Metrodrome in Minneapolis for Super Bowl XXVI. As the teams left the field for the Winter Magic opener, In Living Color aired live on Fox, its full cast crowding the stage and bringing down SNL’s closing curtain. Carrey began by revealing a 26-minute countdown timer in the bottom left corner of the screen that would let viewers know when to rewind for the second half. “You won’t miss any of this senseless brutality!” »

In Living Color carried the football theme through its parodies Homeboy Shopping Network and Fire Marshal Bill. But none more shocking than the Men on Football sketch: Playing a flamboyant, gay cultural critic in the style of Siskel and Ebert alongside Grier, Damon improvised jokes that amplified damaging sex rumors about Richard Gere as well as Carl Lewis, exceeding the censors’ five-second time limit. (The joke was quickly removed from future versions of the episode.) And while some viewers took offense — “We’re angry but not surprised,” said Glaad’s Chris Fowler — reviews were overwhelmingly positive. “It made me forget how much money my husband was losing [on the game]” a New York woman said in a letter to the Syracuse Post-Standard newspaper.

But the final grades made headlines. A total of 22 million people switched from CBS to Fox for the alternate distribution of In Living Color, surpassing Winter Magic and the ratings for the second half. Washington’s domination of the game didn’t help.

The NFL was shaken. “We [at the league] “This will never happen again,” Jim Steeg, the NFL’s former senior vice president of special events, told ESPN. “We had identified who we wanted to pursue. [for the next half-time show] by March. And we met Michael Jackson’s agent. At the next Super Bowl in Pasadena, when Buffalo and Dallas were hunkered down inside, the King of Pop appeared at the 50-yard line and soaked in the adulation of the capacity Rose Bowl crowd before launching into his sports anthem, Jam. A record 133 million viewers watched the show in the United States alone.

Since then, the Super Bowl halftime has been a television event. And after Kendrick Lamar’s politically charged halftime show surpassed Michael Jackson’s audience record last year, it’s going to take a lot of fireworks from Kirk and Co to rival Bad Bunny – a three-time winner at last Sunday’s Grammys (his Spanish-language record Debí Tirar Más Fotos won album of the year) who headlined one of the world’s biggest tours despite his decision not to perform on the mainland of the United States to protest against the mass of the Trump administration. deportation program. All the while, the NFL stood firm in its choice.

“Look, Bad Bunny is one of the greatest artists in the world,” commissioner Roger Goodell said Monday at his annual pregame news conference. “That’s one of the reasons why we chose him. But the other reason is that he understood the platform that he was on, and that platform is used to unite people and to be able to bring people together with their creativity, with their talent, and to be able to use this moment to do that.”

Ultimately, the In Living Color halftime show was unique. The series itself didn’t last much longer, going off the air in 1994 after five seasons. Even Chris Rock, who joined the cast of season five, after being fired by SNL, couldn’t save the series that had become a cultural touchstone. Most of the stars were gone: the entire Wayans family left at the end of season four, with Keenen citing business and creative control as the reasons. But Fox, which would slowly move away from the black-led shows that built the network to appeal to a broader audience, had already lined up programming to more than make up for slowing Sunday ratings.

In 1993, Fox snatched the NFL broadcast program from CBS in a $1.6 billion deal. Four years later, the Super Bowl landed on Bart Simpson’s network; in 2020, Fox carried the game again, with Shakira headlining alongside Jennifer Lopez – the original Fly Girl. There’s no doubt that for die-hard In Living Color fans, the show’s heavy hand in crafting this entire show was unmissable.

Turning Point isn’t the first to take a page from In Living Color’s Super Bowl playbook. Animal Planet’s Puppy Bowl, pay-per-view Lingerie Bowl, and even SNL have all attempted to lure viewers into orbit around the big game. But only In Living Color managed to achieve the biggest ratings grab in the history of American television. Kirk and Kid Rock have their work cut out for them.