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

WWhen the NFL announced Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny as the main star of this year’s Super Bowl halftime show, it entered straight into a culture war. Right-wing critics were angered by the musician’s gender-nonconforming style, Spanish-language music, and anti-MAGA policies. Donald Trump, after saying he had never heard of Bad Bunny, called the headline choice “completely ridiculous.”

In response, Erika Kirk and her conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA turned the controversy into their own counter-programming event: the All-American Halftime Show. After announcing its heavy lineup in Nashville, led by Kid Rock, on Monday, Vice President J.D. Vance was the first among conservatives to enthusiastically spread the word.

Overall, the cast of replacements is shaping up to be Turning Point’s most challenging gesture yet, a huge middle finger to leftist values ​​— and it might have been so if one of the blackest shows on television hadn’t pulled it off first and best. “We stole the audience,” actor Marlon Wayans said recently. “And the next year, they said, ‘You’ll never do that.’ Which once again.'”

In 1990, a new comedy called In Living Color hit the then-nascent Fox network. Riding the momentum of a film career that included writing and producing credits on Eddie Murphy’s Raw, In Living Color creator Keenen Ivory Wayans positioned the show in SNL’s blind spot, bringing black culture, racial nuances and queer sensibilities to the forefront with a gritty, streetwise edge. The cast of In Living Color was a negative image of the typical SNL ensemble — a mix of future stars (Jamie Foxx, David Alan Grier), members of the Wayans family (Marlon and Damon, an SNL cast member) and hired DEI (Jim Carrey); Jennifer Lopez began her career on the show as a Fly Girls dancer.

Not only did the sketches arrive in Living Color; They have become national refrains echoing in break rooms and schoolyards, and there was perhaps no escape from Damon Wayans’ angry clown line: “Dude, don’t play that.” The show was on the cutting edge of rap, booking Public Enemy, Queen Latifah and more hip-hop acts at a time when the big three networks were still wary of young black artists.

Keenen’s quirky SNL show soon became as big as its inspiration, drawing 12 million viewers a week in Sunday primetime — a major television evening in those days. But of course it wasn’t as watched as the NFL, a television property that Fox’s Rupert Murdoch desperately wanted for his young network.

During In Living Color’s first season, a marketing executive named Jay Coleman approached Fox with an idea that would attract bigger ratings. and Stick it to CBS, the NFL rights holder and Super Bowl company that Murdoch had his eye on: a special episode of In Living Color that would air opposite the Super Bowl halftime.

The Super Bowl halftime show was up for grabs then — “the time when everyone went to pee,” Kenin told ESPN in 2021. “They created a halftime show for 100,000 people in the stadium that I don’t think translates well to the small screen,” Coleman said in 1991. Worse still, the shows were extremely boring — a mixture of dusty nostalgia acts and serious bands, preceded by a monotonous speech from the NFL commissioner. “I don’t know anyone who likes half the time except parents of kids walking down the field,” Kenin said in a 1992 Los Angeles Times interview before his Warring aired.

The halftime theme of the 1992 Super Bowl was “Winter Magic” – a poem praising the upcoming Winter Olympics in Albertville, France. The show was an ice skating routine between American sweethearts Dorothy Hamill and Brian Boitano set to live music from — wait for it — Gloria Estefan. “Why would you feature a singer from the Miami Sound Machine band in a show called ‘Winter Magic’?” one Hartford Courant reviewer asked next.

At Living Color, she promised not only funnier production — live and recorded sketches, Color Me Badd singing the R&B hit Wanna Sex You Up — but also lower prices for advertisers. Frito-Lay paid $2 million for the exclusive rights to In Living Color’s Super Bowl Halftime Party, money that barely covers a 75-second ad on the CBS television network. “Bland” is how George F. Schweitzer, a senior CBS executive, called Fox’s Super Bowl ploy, believing it would “only appeal to people who watch In Living Color.”

The country found out just how wrong Schweitzer was on Jan. 26, 1992, when Buffalo met Washington at the Metrodrome in Minneapolis in Super Bowl XXVI. As the teams walked off the field to open the Winter Magic, In Living Color was shown live on Fox, its full cast piling onto the stage and turning the SNL closing curtain on its head. Curry began by revealing a 26-minute countdown clock in the bottom left corner of the screen that would let viewers know when to return for the second half. “You won’t miss any of the senseless brutality!”

In Living Color carried the football theme with its parodies of Homeboy Shopping Network and Fire Marshal Bill. But nothing was as shocking as the “Men in Football” sketch: playing a Siskel and Ebert-style gay cultural critic alongside Greer, Damon created improvised jokes that amplified damaging sexual rumors about Richard Gere as well as Carl Lewis, bypassing a five-second censorship delay. (The joke was quickly deleted from future versions of the episode.) While some viewers were offended — Glaad’s Chris Fowler said, “We’re angry but not surprised” — the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. “It made me forget how much money my husband was losing [on the game]said a New York woman in a letter to the Syracuse Post-Standard.

But the final ratings were the headline. Overall, 22 million people switched from CBS to Fox for the In Living Color replacement team, outpacing Winter Magic and the ratings in the second half. Washington’s control of the game didn’t help.

The NFL was shaken. “we [at the league] “This will never happen again,” Jim Steig, formerly the NFL’s senior vice president of special events, told ESPN. “We identified who we wanted to go after [for the next half-time show] By March. We met Michael Jackson’s agent. At the next Super Bowl in Pasadena, as Buffalo and Dallas dug in, the King of Pop appeared at the 50-yard line and indulged in the adulation of the Rose Bowl crowd before breaking into his sports anthem, Jam. A record 133 million viewers tuned in from the United States alone.

The Super Bowl has been assigned half of its television time since then. And after Kendrick Lamar’s politically charged halftime eclipse surpassed Michael Jackson’s record-breaking viewership last year, it’s going to take plenty of fireworks from Kirk and company to compete with Bad Bunny — a three-time winner at last Sunday’s Grammy Awards (his Spanish-language record Debí Tirar Más Fotos was named Album of the Year) who has headlined one of the world’s top tours despite his decision not to perform within the continent. United States in protest against the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. All the while the NFL has been consistent in its selection.

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

In the end, the halftime show at In Living Color was a one-man show. The series itself did not last much longer, as it went off the air in 1994 after five seasons. Not even Chris Rock, who joined the cast in Season 5 and was recently fired by SNL, can save the show that has become a cultural touchstone. Most of the Stars Are Gone: The entire Wayans family left by the end of Season 4, with Kenen citing work and creative control as his reasons. But Fox, which will slowly transition away from the black-led shows it built the network to chase wider viewership, had already positioned its programming to make up for any lagging Sunday ratings.

In 1993, Fox snatched the NFL broadcast package from CBS in a $1.6 billion deal. Four years later, the Super Bowl landed on the Bart Simpson Network; In 2020, Fox picked up the game again, with Shakira co-starring alongside Jennifer Lopez – the original Fly Girl. Undoubtedly for In Living Color fans, the show’s heavy hand in shaping this entire scene was unmissable.

Turning Point isn’t the first to take a page out of In Living Color’s Super Bowl playbook. Animal Planet’s Puppy Bowl, Lingerie Bowl, and even SNL have all tried to attract viewers who are all about the big game. But only In Living Color pulled off the biggest audience steal in the history of American television. Kirk and Kid Rock have their work cut out for them.