My essay on the oddball radical television treasure TVTV GOES TO THE SUPER BOWL (1976) is now in print. It's in The Velvet Light Trap's new issue, "Sports and/as Media Studies."
Excerpt: “This article examines how TVTV’s Super Bowl, as a work of guerrilla television, subverts the accepted mythology of American football. Breaking from conventional network TV processes and forms, TVTV’s disarming, improvisational, and at times jocular approach achieves a difficult double move: it satirizes the media spectacle of professional football while at the same time humaniz- ing its constituent performers. I propose that TVTV’s intervention into the sports media space destabilizes the dominant image of masculinity as embodied and expressed in popular football documentary (notably, the repertoire of NFL Films); docufictional series, such as Hard Knocks (HBO, 2001–), Friday Night Lights (NBC, 2006–2011), and Last Chance U (Netflix, 2016–2020); and standard broadcast television coverage of the sport (see any NFL telecast). I argue that TVTV’s counterhegemonic vision is made possible by its status as an ethnographic television-art hybrid that exists outside of the production model and distribution circuit of American sports entertainment culture. Arising from the interwoven traditions of activist media, community-based video, public television, and video art, TVTV’s Super Bowl operates against the dominant logics of broadcast television, eluding bureaucracy, professionalism, and mastery in favor of messy experimental aesthetics, social engagement, and vulnerability. By shifting focus away from the story line of a game to the images and subjectivities of those who play, Super Bowl expands the horizon of masculine representation in body culture, offers an alternative means of identification, and reimagines football as a non-zero-sum game. “
Info: https://doi.org/10.7560/VLT8704
Image: Lynn Swann narrates his injury history for the TVTV cameras. Still from TVTV Goes to the Super Bowl (Top Value Television, 1976).
