Core Response (2)

Hailing from the Midwest, I was raised regarding the Super Bowl as something of a national holiday. Timing-wise, it was only natural for me to have the big game in mind during the readings. Though it doesn’t seem naturally in conversation, to me, Lynn Spigel’s article felt especially relevant to the broadcasting of the live game. I was expecially compelled to apply her reading of the advertiser’s role in 1950s sitcoms to the way live sports are structured. Spigel details how the sitcoms like The Goldbergs were structurally framed by advertisements in a way to elicit the feeling that “the story had been brought to our homes through the courtesy of the sponsor” while also situating the “advertiser’s discourse…in a world closer to the viewer’s real life” (18). This framing structure is heavily utilized in the broadcasting of live sports. Many live sports events are openly brought to the viewing audience by sponsors that are repeatedly referenced throughout the broadcast. Commercials viewed in between plays are sometimes referenced by the commentators. The NFL logo is consistently scattered through commercial ads, partnering with several different advertising companies to bring the NFL name and concept always in conjunction with something else. Spigel specifically references an episode of The Goldbergs, when an RCA representative shows home monitors in a commercial hat visually references Molly Goldberg, and then the commercial fluidly transitions in the show. This is readily present in NFL broadcasts (and other sports broadcasts), where a famous player (take Aaron Rogers in a State Farm ad) appears in a commercial, which then transitions into the game where that very player will be shown on screen (and sometimes the very commercial referenced itself). Spigel uses this to elucidate how the “turn from commercial to fiction dramatizes the separation of the ad from the program, thus giving the ad a non-fictional status” (19). What becomes interesting then, in a viewing experience like the Super Bowl, is the audience fascination with the ads. What happens when the commercials and ads become the show itself, and the sports event only an extension or complement of the ads? Though operating vastly different than 1950s sitcoms, the role of the advertiser to widely viewed television programs, it seems, has remained rootedly similar.