Monday Night Football and the Racial Roots of the Network TV Event

Launched in 1970, American Broadcasting Company’s (ABC) Monday Night Football made live prime time sports television viable when most sports broadcasts were relegated to weekends. It did so in part by packaging games for a crossover viewership. To this end, it suppressed racial divisiveness that might splinter the mainstream audience it sought. ABC parlayed Monday Night Football’s widespread popularity into prime time TV events beyond sports broadcasts that grew out of the programming flows it established and reflected its racial politics, including the made-for-TV melodrama Brian’s Song (1971) and the miniseries Roots (1977). Like Monday Night Football, these marquee TV events courted a crossover audience in part by downplaying racial discord. Although overlooked in scholarship that historicizes and critiques network television’s racial politics, Monday Night Football established intersecting representational conventions and programming norms that informed the mediation of race on some of U.S. television’s most visible, celebrated, and influential TV events.