Last summer the NFL made a groundbreaking free-to-air broadcast deal with British broadcaster Channel 5 (a subsidiary of Skydance-owned Paramount) with the aim of growing interest in the sport across the pond.
Hosted by Dermot O’Leary, Sam Quek and Osi Umenyiora and produced by Hungry Bear Media, the first season has seen a typical NFL game interspersed with punditry, quizzes and audience games to appeal to families as well as longtime fans. While the response has been mixed (“the initial reaction from hardcore NFL fans was very much split,” admits Hungry Bear exec producer Luke Shiach) viewers have warmed up as the season has worn on, spurred partly by an understanding that the format needs to be family-friendly to attract U.K. audiences – something Taylor Swift has helped with too, incidentally.
Ahead of Channel 5’s “NFL: Big Game Night,” which will broadcast the Super Bowl LX live from San Fancisco from 10.30pm U.K. time on Sunday Feb. 8, Shiach sat down with Variety to talk about what it’s been like to bring the NFL to the U.K., what the team has planned for Sunday and, of course, the Swift effect.
What has the response been from U.K. viewers so far?
The big problem for the NFL gaining traction in the U.K. is it’s very stop-starty with ad breaks built into the actual game mechanics for the U.S. TV market. So across a game, I think it’s like 28 or 30 ad breaks. We don’t have as many ad break requirements on British TV — in fact, we’re not allowed them — so rather than filling those ad breaks with regular punditry, [we thought] what if you kept the audience entertained with a studio game show entertainment format. We piloted it, it went well. [The NFL] loved the craziness of it, the zaniness… and so that’s what we’ve done for the whole season. The initial reaction from hardcore NFL fans was very much split between “Brilliant, we’ve got free games to watch” but they hated the [studio] games — they felt patronized — whereas very, very quickly we got really good feedback from families, parents. Dads who would sneak off and watch it previously on their own were suddenly finding that their kids would watch it. But slowly the NFL chat rooms and Reddit groups became a little bit more positive. And then as we got more towards the business end of the season, we slightly toned down the games and the zaniness and the competitions.
Given the play can stop at any point, what is that like from a production perspective?
During the season, it’s been unbelievable. We never know when there’s going to be a break, because it’s dictated by the match. We’re in the gallery listening to the U.S. gallery, because we take the U.S. feed. Often that’s chaos. Sometimes they’re fighting about whether they’re going to a break or staying on the field. We’re following them. We’ve got Dermot on the floor going, “Are we coming to the studio, or are we going to punditry, or are we going to a break? What are we doing?” And we’ll sometimes have no notice, and literally, we’ll say, “Dermot coming to you in 10 seconds and you’ve got a minute to fill,” or “We’ve got a highlight or a replay, let’s talk about that.” And then he’s got stats to get through and guests to bring in and then we’ve got to shut it down and get back to the play before we miss a snap, because we were told if you missed the beginning of a play, people get furious. So it’s been an unbelievable process.
What do you have planned for Super Bowl Sunday?
If everything goes to plan, it’s going to be amazing. We’re in San Fran at the moment, shooting VTs. We’ve got Sam Quek with us, we had access to the Pro Bowl. The [gameshow] game we’ve played in every episode is called “NFL or…?” NFL players have unbelievable names. Americans have unbelievable names. And we found out that you can play a game called “NFL or…?” anything. So the first one we did was “NFL [player] or rapper?” But what we found out was it was even better when you did “NFL player or British [gas] station?” or “NFL player or Shakespeare character?” or “NFL player or paint color?” So that has become our sort of signature game. And so we played it with these absolute superstars like Dak Prescott and Cameron Dicker and Brandon Aubrey. We did “NFL or Britain?” So Gretna Green, is he an NFL player or a place in Britain?
The Super Bowl is such a huge cultural moment in the U.S. Do you think you can turn it into something similar for the U.K.?
Listen, I don’t know if we’ll ever get to the American level, because it’s taken 100 years or whatever, but definitely the aspiration is to move it from being a niche cultural event that’s quite interesting to becoming something where people put it in their calendar and go [to a] Super Bowl watch party.
In terms of trying to grow the British interest, this year we’ve been given a really, really helpful calling card, which is that the defensive coordinator for the Seahawks is a Brit, Adam Durde. We got a sit-down interview with him on Monday with Sam, so that will feature in our run up. He’s such a lovely guy.
The other thing that I think is quite good for a British audience is seeing themselves in the broadcast. So we’ve got the NFL official watch party in Walthamstow […] and we’ll try and drop that in so during a break in play Dermot will go, “What a touchdown! Let’s see how it was celebrated back in London.” So we’ll get a shot of, hopefully, people throwing their beer in the air.
How helpful has Taylor Swift been in expanding the NFL audience in the U.K.?
It’s such a process to try and introduce a new culture to an existing culture and we’ve got so many big sports in the U.K. Taylor Swift definitely has helped plant the seed of NFL, anecdotally. We tried to cotton on to the Taylor Swift effect. We had a Kansas City Chiefs game, so we got a Taylor Swift lookalike booked, and we planted her in a special part of the audience. We had a little allusion to her at the end of the show. We never named her. We just sort of subtly said, “Ooh, a big Travis Kelsey fan.” We hoped we’d get a few Swifties joining us — I don’t know if it worked!
This interview has been edited and condensed for space and clarity.