![]() Through his boredom, Coleman, who died in 2011, saw an opportunity. The years before that, performers included aging entertainers (Chubby Checker, George Burns, Mickey Rooney), the cultish, morally hectoring singing ensemble, Up With People, and more college marching bands. The year before, the main act was an Elvis impersonator named Elvis Presto. This was hardly an unusual feeling during Super Bowl halftimes. Coleman told Gold that he’d recently been at the Super Bowl in New Orleans, watching the halftime show – which featured three local college marching bands performing odes to the host city – bored out of his mind. The idea had its roots in a phone call from a guy named Jay Coleman to ILC’s executive in charge of production (and Keenen’s manager), Eric Gold, a year earlier. That’s exactly what this was designed to do.” We’d rush in there, throw a punch, then run out before the competition knew what hit them. “It was wholly consistent with everything we stood for,” says Sandy Grushow, who was EVP of Fox’s Entertainment Division. ![]() They’d been promoting themselves as the “Bad Boys of Television,” irreverent upstarts with no respect for age-old industry norms. But if Fox could get just a fraction of those Super Bowl viewers to turn the channel, Kellner argued, it’d be a coup. There just weren’t enough viewers leftover to make it worthwhile. The conventional wisdom was it wasn’t worth it for the other networks to sink money into programming opposite the game. At that point, it was consistently watched by more than one hundred million people in the U.S. The Super Bowl was then and remains the most viewed television event of the year. We’ll convince America to turn the channel at halftime.'” “I remember thinking, Where is he going with this? He said, ‘We should do a live episode of In Living Color. “Jamie started talking about how nobody watches the halftime,” says Dan McDermott, a programming executive who worked on In Living Color. CBS had the rights to the next one, and in fact, the rights to the next few Super Bowls were already locked down by other networks. SNL’s Trump Rants About Rihanna and ‘Gay’ Buttigieg in East PalestineĪt a staff meeting, on a Tuesday in 1991, FOX president Jamie Kellner began musing about the Super Bowl. ![]() But in one case, it definitely does: In an excerpt from Homey Don’t Play That!, the FOX show’s cast, producers, writers and executives explain how In Living Color changed Super Bowl halftimes forever. Defining and detailing a legacy can be a tricky business – influence doesn’t always run in straight, clear lines. ![]() Homey Don’t Play That!: The Story of In Living Color and the Black Comedy Revolution is both the warts-and-all story of the making and unmaking of a once-great television sketch show, and a chronicle of this moment in time when a murderer’s row of creative talent, including Keenen Ivory Wayans, Arsenio Hall, Robert Townsend, Spike Lee, John Singleton, Chris Rock, Chuck D, Queen Latifah, Ice Cube and Tupac Shakur, rose to prominence. It was part of a wave of black culture that completely remade the mainstream in its own image. But with time, it’s become clear that In Living Color was more than just a very funny sketch show that helped launch the careers of the Wayans family, Jim Carrey, Jamie Foxx, David Alan Grier, Rosie Perez and Jennifer Lopez. In Living Color lasted just five seasons on the air from 1990 to 1994, and when it was cancelled it got the quick, disappointed eulogy one might expect for a show that briefly burned hard and bright but had already lost some of its mojo. ![]()
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