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Main >> News Listing >> February 2004 >> Article ID 4056
 Up With a Wholesome Halftime Show? | Type: Internet Article |
| | Up With a Wholesome Halftime Show? | Feb 06, 2004 | by Joal Ryan
Summary:
The Pro Bowl's up-with-Hawaii show aside, one indication that the Super Bowl's future may not be markedly different from its recent past is that McCarthy says the league was "pleased" with its halftime shows up until Sunday's. That means the likes of Shania Twain (news), U2, even "Stripped" singer Christina Aguilera (news) all worked for the NFL. |
Janet Jackson has been punished. Justin Timberlake has been "embarrassed." JC Chasez (news), who wasn't even at the scene of the grope, has been bounced.
In the wake of the Super Bowl debut of Jackson's solar-shaped nipple shield, have we reached the tipping point for what passes for entertainment at TV's most-watched event?
"If the Super Bowl were to be played again this Sunday, I have a feeling we'd have a clown making balloon animals at halftime," says Robert J. Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.
The professor isn't far off. The National Football League's Pro Bowl, which will be played this Sunday, is to feature host-state Hawaii's version of the Disneyland Main Street Parade--200 hula dancers, 1,000 Hawaiian dancers, assorted conch shell blowers and a local duo singing a song called "Welcome to My Paradise." All this after Chasez, Timberlake's 'N Sync (news - web sites) mate, was removed from the halftime lineup when the NFL decided it was in no mood to hear the popster wax lyrical on the subject, "Blowin' Me Up (With Her Love)."
NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy says the league's decision to chase Chasez is a sign of how the league will monitor its big-game shows in the future.
Does this mean we'll see hula dancers at next year's Super Bowl? The University of Michigan marching band? The return of Up With People?
"Do they even still exist?," asks McCarthy of Up With People, the inarguably wholesome performing group-slash-international nonprofit which holds the record, with four, for most Super Bowl halftime appearances.
The bottom line is even if Timberlake ripping away Jackson's bustier while singing "I can have you naked by the end of this song" is, as Thompson suggests, "the straw that broke the camel's back," no one's predicting the pop-culture clock is going to be reset to, say, 1976, when Up With People saluted the Bicentennial in cheery song.
"These kind of moral panics arise every once in a while," says T.V. Reed, director of American Studies at Washington State University, who expects the latest to eventually subside.
The Pro Bowl's up-with-Hawaii show aside, one indication that the Super Bowl's future may not be markedly different from its recent past is that McCarthy says the league was "pleased" with its halftime shows up until Sunday's. That means the likes of Shania Twain (news), U2, even "Stripped" singer Christina Aguilera (news) all worked for the NFL.
Since 1991, when New Kids on the Block took Super Bowl center stage, no halftime show has been minus a big-name entertainer. (To be sure, many of the big names--Diana Ross (news), Smokey Robinson (news) and Tony Bennett (news), included--have been culled from the ranks of the non-cutting-edge.)
Still, to Reed, it's no surprise that the game, which once hung its halftime hopes on Hello, Dolly! star Carol Channing (news), began to go after the MTV generation with the likes of Michael Jackson (news) (1993), Aguilera (2000), Enrique Iglesias (2000) and 'N Sync (2001). Competition made upping the ante inevitable, he says.
"I think it's probably a lost cause [to turn back the clock] given the number of television channels...and the Internet, [which] makes so many different kind of content available," Reed says.
Even Up With People doesn't see Up With People getting a shot at a fifth Super Bowl.
"It's just such a different business now," says Jeff Hoag, chairman and chief executive officer of the Denver-based organization.
Indeed, Up With People got out of the entertainment business in 2000. Today, under the banner WorldSmart Leadership Program, it's strictly a study-abroad program for college-age young people.
If the NFL called up Hoag today, he wouldn't have a show for the league. "We've always been interested in the NFL, but probably in a different capacity," he says.
Thompson, for one, has some ideas about how the NFL can present its Super Bowl halftime in a "different capacity." Instead of music acts, he suggests comedians, circus performers or a parade of Super Bowl heroes past.
If those proposals sound a little square, Thompson has a thought for you: "I think all the Super Bowl shows have been a little square. Even this year's."
CBS president and CEO Les Moonves, under fire for Jackson's under-investigation, breast-baring incident, begs to differ.
In Thursday's New York Post, Moonves says Jackson's stunt, broadcast on his network, set back "edgy musical acts" on live TV. (To whit: CBS' "live" Grammys (news - web sites) telecast on Sunday will be delivered to the TV nation on as much as a five-minute delay. The Oscars (news - web sites) and the National Basketball Association's All-Star Game likely will be subjected to similar, if not-as-extensive broadcast safeguards.)
But there is something else, beyond the cause of truly live TV, which bugs Moonves. "I didn't need [Jackson's breast] to get ratings," he gripes in the Post. "I could've put on Andy Williams (news) and gotten the same ratings."
Except CBS didn't put on Andy Williams, currently in exile in Branson, Missouri. And CBS didn't put on Up With People. And who thinks any network, trying to keep a Stateside audience of 140 million-plus from flipping over to the Lingerie Bowl, ever will again?
"I don't think so," Thompson says of the Super Bowl prospects of Up With People-type acts, "[but] I mean, stranger things have happened."
As last Sunday's wardrobe malfunction proved. |
 Source: Yahoo! News | |
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