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Monday Night Football still a big deal — just not like it once was | Opinion
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- Monday Night Football still a big deal — just not like it once was | Opinion
Primetime national TV. A visit by the team described as the current "kings of Monday Night Football," plus a question raised by the push alerts popping up on my phone: Will Taylor Swift attend ?
Spoiler alert: Taylor likely will not attend the Jaguars -Chiefs game. But this still is a big deal for Jacksonville. It's Monday Night Football.
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More: Will Taylor Swift attend Jaguars Monday Night Football game vs. Chiefs in Jacksonville?
Started in 1970, it's the longest-running sports series on American TV. Only "60 Minutes" and the daytime soap operas have had longer streaks. And with all due credit to decades of "General Hospital," MNF just might be the ultimate American soap opera, with more than its share of drama, and with a long list of characters to love and hate, from Howard Cosell to Joe Buck, Joe Namath to Patrick Mahomes.
To a degree, it remains the rare event that still can have people watching the same thing one night and talking about it around the water cooler the next morning.
But here's the obvious: We don't watch TV or, for that matter, gather around water coolers like we once did. And primarily because of that, Monday Night Football isn't as big a deal as it once was.
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Those '70s shows: MNF and SNL
Warning: Incoming nostalgia from someone who grew up in the decade that birthed both Monday Night Football and , 50 years ago this month, Saturday Night Live.
This isn't simply a matter of remembering the days of MNF with Cosell, Gifford and Meredith and SNL with Belushi, Akroyd and Radner — and saying it's all been downhill since then.
If you go back and watch early seasons of SNL, you'll be reminded that while some skits were classics, many were clunkers, forgotten by Sunday morning.
I disagree with those who say SNL hasn't been funny since a certain year (often whatever year they were in high school). And when it comes to MNF, I don't agree with those who say it hasn't been good since Don Meredith last sang, "Turn out the lights, the party's over."
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For those not alive then, this was Meredith's signature way of declaring a team had wrapped up the victory. Cosell hated it, which made viewers who hated Cosell love it. And a lot of viewers hated Cosell. Someone even began selling foam rubber bricks with "Cosell" printed on the side, available for viewers to throw at the TVs.
But we watched. Every Monday night. And we stayed glued to the TV at halftime, waiting for highlights of Sunday's games. Making those felt like validation for your team and your city. We probably cared way more about that than we should've. But, again, it's hard to explain just how big a deal MNF was by the 1980s.
As I've explained to my daughter when describing the ancient times known as the 1970s, we had three channels to choose from. If you were lucky, maybe a fourth UHF channel. But it was mainly CBS, NBC and — last in the ratings when MNF started — ABC. And while one of my friends had cable and a VCR, most of America still watched TV the way we did in my house. You either saw a show or you missed it.
In the early 1970s, CBS filled its Monday nights with Gunsmoke, Here's Lucy, Mayberry R.F.D., The Doris Day Show and The Carol Burnett Show. NBC showed The Red Skelton Show, Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, NBC Monday Night at the Movies
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ABC began showing NFL games.
Not just Monday night
Roone Arledge, ABC's top sports executive, envisioned an entertainment spectacle, saying: "There is something about the look of a night game, with the lights bouncing off the helmets."
That novelty is long gone.
Some of this is the NFL's own doing. It isn't just that last season the Chiefs played a game on every day of the week except Tuesday, or that the NFL kicked off this season with a Friday game in Brazil. Now the NFL sometimes schedules two games for a Monday night. But even more than all of that, now there are endless things to watch, whenever we want to watch them.
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In many ways, MNF is actually better today than it was in those early years. But it isn't bigger. It never will be.
This is true for all television, other than maybe the Super Bowl and huge breaking news. America will never again gather around TVs like we did for the final episode of "M*A*S*H" in 1983. By the time the Jaguars played in their first MNF game in 1997, television had changed, because the world had changed.
I don't necessarily want to go back to 1970. I'm spoiled (and often overwhelmed) by the viewing choices today. And when I go back and look at what was on TV in the 1970s, I'm reminded that a lot of it really wasn't very good. And some of it was really bad.
But — and this is something I didn't think about at the time — part of the magic of 1970s television was that we all were watching shows at the same time, then repeating the catch phrases, humming the theme songs. It's what has since been dubbed "appointment TV."
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Monday Night Football isn't what it once was. But it's one of those events that still has some of that buzz, especially when it comes to your town. So turn on the lights. The party isn't over.
mwoods@jacksonville.com
(904) 359-4212
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Why Monday Night Football isn't what it once was
