‘We stole the Tremendous Bowl viewers’: how In Residing Shade pulled off the best heist in US TV historical past | US tv

When the NFL announced Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny as this year’s Super Bowl half-time show headliner, it walked right into a culture war. Right-wing critics raged over the musician’s gender-nonconforming style, Spanish-language music and anti-Maga politics. Donald Trump, after saying he had never heard of Bad Bunny, called the headlining choice “absolutely ridiculous”.

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

In the main, the alt-cast is meant to be Turning Point’s most defiant gesture yet, a massive middle finger to leftist values – and perhaps it would be if one of the Blackest shows on TV hadn’t pulled it off first and best. “We stole the audience,” the actor Marlon Wayans said recently. “And the next year, they were like, ‘Y’all are never doing that again.’”

In 1990 a new sketch comedy called In Living Color splattered on to the then fledgling 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 set the show in SNL’s blindspot, bringing Black culture, ethnic nuance and queer sensibilities to the fore with a fearless, streetwise edge. The In Living Color cast was a photo negative of the typical SNL lineup – a mix of future stars (Jamie Foxx, David Alan Grier), Wayans family members (Marlon and Damon, an SNL castoff) and DEI hires (Jim Carrey); Jennifer Lopez got her showbiz start on the show as a Fly Girls dancer.

In Living Color sketches didn’t just land; they became national refrains that echoed across break rooms and schoolyards, perhaps none more inescapable than Damon Wayans’ angry-clown punchline: “Homie don’t play that.” The show was a rap vanguard, booking Public Enemy, Queen Latifah and more hip-hop acts at a time when the big three networks were still cagey about young Black performers.

Keenen’s bizarro SNL quickly became as big as its inspiration, drawing 12 million viewers a week on Sunday primetime – a major TV night in those days. But of course it wasn’t as watched as the NFL, a TV property that Fox honcho Rupert Murdoch desperately wanted for his young network.

During In Living Color’s first season, a marketing impresario named Jay Coleman approached Fox with an idea that would draw even bigger ratings and stick it to CBS, the NFL rights holder and Super Bowl carrier that Murdoch had in his sights: a special episode of In Living Color that would air opposite the Super Bowl intermission.

The Super Bowl half-time spectacular was ripe for the picking back then – “the time that everybody went to pee”, as Keenen put it to ESPN in 2021. “They create a half-time show for the 100,000 people in the stadium that I don’t think translates that well to the small screen,” Coleman said in 1991. Even worse, the performances were deathly dull – a hodgepodge of dusty nostalgia acts and earnest marching bands, preceded by a monotone speech from the NFL commissioner. “I don’t know anyone who likes half-time except for the parents of the children marching on the field,” Keenen said in a 1992 LA Times interview ahead of his warring broadcast.

The theme for the 1992 Super Bowl half-time was “Winter Magic” – an ode to the forthcoming winter Olympics in Albertville, France. The showstopper was a figure 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 in a show called ‘Winter Magic’?” a Hartford Courant reviewer wondered afterward.

In Living Color not only promised a friskier production – live and taped sketches, Color Me Badd singing their monster R&B hit I Wanna Sex You Up – but also cut-rate prices for advertisers. Frito-Lay paid $2m for exclusive rights to In Living Color’s Super Bowl Halftime Party, money that would have barely covered a 75-second ad on the CBS telecast. “Cute” was how George F Schweitzer, a senior flack for CBS, described Fox’s Super Bowl subterfuge, believing it would only “appeal to the people who watch In Living Color”.

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

In Living Color carried the football theme through its Homeboy Shopping Network and Fire Marshal Bill parodies. But nothing shocked like the Men on Football sketch: playing a flamboyantly gay Siskel and Ebert style culture critic alongside Grier, Damon improvised jokes that amplified damaging sexual rumors about Richard Gere as well as Carl Lewis, slipping past the censors’ five-second delay. (The joke was quickly scrubbed from future versions of the episode.) And while some viewers took offense – “We are angry but not surprised,” Glaad’s Chris Fowler said – the reviews were overwhelmingly positive. “It made me forget how much money my husband was losing [on the game],” one New York woman said in a letter to Syracuse’s Post-Standard newspaper.

But the final ratings were the big headline. Altogether, 22 million people switched from CBS to Fox for the In Living Color alt-cast, outdrawing Winter Magic and cratering ratings for the second half. Washington dominating the game didn’t help.

The NFL was shook. “We [at the league] said, ‘This isn’t going to ever happen again,’” Jim Steeg, formerly the NFL’s senior vice-president of special events, told ESPN. “We had identified who we wanted to go after [for the next half-time show] by March. And we met with Michael Jackson’s agent.” At the very next Super Bowl in Pasadena, when Buffalo and Dallas ducked inside, the king of pop appeared at the 50-yard line and soaked in the adulation from the capacity Rose Bowl crowd before breaking into his jock anthem, Jam. A record 133 million viewers tuned in from the US alone.

The Super Bowl half-time has been appointment television ever since. And after Kendrick Lamar’s politically charged half-time topped Michael Jackson’s record-setting viewership last year, it will take a whole lot of fireworks from Kirk and Co to compete with Bad Bunny – a three-time winner at last Sunday’s Grammys (his Spanish-language record Debí Tirar Más Fotos took album of the year) who headlined one of the world’s top tours in spite of his decision to not perform inside the continental US in protest of the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda. All the while the NFL has held firm in its choice.

“Listen, Bad Bunny is one of the great artists in the world,” commissioner Roger Goodell said in his annual pre-game news conference on Monday. “That’s one of the reasons we chose him. But the other reason is he understood the platform he was on, and that this 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 half-time show was a one-and-done. The series itself didn’t last much longer, going off the air in 1994 after five seasons. Not even Chris Rock joining the cast in season five, fresh off being fired by SNL, could save the show that had become a cultural touchstone. Most of the stars had moved on: the entire Wayans family departed by the end of season four, with Keenen citing business and creative control as his reasons. But Fox, which would slowly pivot from the Black-led shows that built the network to chase broader viewership, had already lined up programming to more than make up for any Sunday ratings slack.

In 1993 Fox wrested CBS’s NFL broadcast package in a $1.6bn deal. Four years later, the Super Bowl landed on Bart Simpson’s network; in 2020 Fox carried the game again, with Shakira co-headlining alongside Jennifer Lopez – the original Fly Girl. No doubt for hardcore In Living Color fans, the show’s heavy hand in shaping that entire spectacle was unmissable.

Turning Point is hardly the first to crib a page from In Living Color’s Super Bowl playbook. Animal Planet’s Puppy Bowl, the pay-per-view Lingerie Bowl and even SNL have all tried to snatch viewers orbiting the big game. But only In Living Color has managed to pull off the greatest audience heist in American television history. Kirk and Kid Rock have their work cut out.