Steely McBeam
Well-known member
- Mar 20, 2019
- 2,135
- 0
Getty Images
Many were surprised to see those awkward, black-and-white, truncated musical performances return to halftime of Monday Night Football games in 2019. But now, after seven weeks of the season, the ’80s-style music videos are no more.
Via AdAge.com, ESPN executives “decided that using halftime for more news and analysis was ultimately the best way to serve our NFL fans.”
The musical acts never really resonated. Most if not all consisted of lip-syncing. Few were actually live. Some, like the Charlie Puth pool party video played during halftime of last Monday’s Patriots-Jets game, had no apparent geographic or temporal connection to the contest in which they were featured.
Some may have noticed the absence of a musical act on Monday night, assuming that the low quality of the game drove the decision. (Indeed, ESPN did not take its studio show from Bristol to Pittsburgh for the game.) But it wasn’t a one-time-only thing; there will be no more precorded musical tracks accompanied by visual images of musicians pretending to sing the songs.