The “Sunday Night Football” music video is gorgeous to behold, every incarnation a novel response to the query: If unshackled from the bonds of terrestrial physics, what may Carrie Underwood expertise? Answers embrace: strutting in a costume of rhinestone chain mail by means of a liminal area stuffed with floating movies of soccer followers; calmly standing on a platform that shoots her skyward by means of hoops of sunshine at a thousand miles a minute; the stage on the Resorts World Theatre in Las Vegas, the positioning of her residency, “Reflection: The Las Vegas Residency,” magically opening up onto a soccer stadium the place roughly seven million followers, filled with atomic density, are dropping their everloving minds to a tune about “Sunday Night Football.”
The “Sunday Night Football” tune is almost certainly the theme tune acquainted to extra Americans than some other, as a result of extra Americans watch “Sunday Night Football” than anything on weekly tv. In reality, of the 30 most-watched U.S. tv broadcasts of all time, 29 are soccer video games. There is perhaps a want to gin up pleasure for “Sunday Night Football” if, someway, each week, “Sunday Night Football” have been scheduled to air straight reverse the unique 1983 broadcast of the sequence finale of “M*A*S*H” — the one nonfootball program to seem within the all-time Top 30 most watched. Under regular circumstances, nevertheless, highlighting the truth that a soccer recreation is about to be televised for the American TV viewers is an act equal to reciting the every day specials to a ravenous man.
It is that this unnecessity — the truth that it exists merely for its personal sake — that makes the section so shifting. I don’t imply to suggest that the opening sequence may examine favorably to, say, a sundown, which is likewise “beautiful” and “capable of reproducing itself in infinite variations”; I imply to say that outright. The tremble-inducing attract of the “Sunday Night Football” tune surpasses nature’s superior generative capability. It is a spectacle that would solely be conjured from a colossal sum of money.
Tripp Dixon, the NBC Sports “VP of Creative” tasked with supervising this visible triumph, likens the sequence to an “airlock” designed to safely transition viewers from the grim actuality of on a regular basis existence to the high-octane fantasia of “Sunday Night Football.” In change for submission to the spectacular, “Sunday Night Football” guarantees a respite from all considerations.
The sly genius of American soccer is that its accouterments — Super Bowl adverts with feature-film budgets, stupefyingly cutting-edge bumper graphics — replicate, even or particularly for these with little interest in soccer, the draw of soccer itself: a celebration of human aptitude and a diversion of consideration away from something extra essential. Through even handed software of Carrie Underwood and C.G.I. expertise, the “Sunday Night Football” tune provides a transient but whole respite from the horror of Sunday evening.
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