NBC

Yesterday NBC hosted this years Superbowl. As part of the pre game entertainment they broadcast a great promo featuring personalities from many of their top shows.

Has a UK network ever done such a thing? Or if not, which could do it best? I personally like this concept of everyone coming together.

The nearest the thing the UK has done like this was the BBC One Christmas promo


In Ireland TV3 had a promo where all the channels stars came together for Christmas dinner

Love it. Very nicely done.

Not singalongs, but the BBC have done a few good promos over the years using personalities from across their programming to remind us what we get for our licence fee:

I'm really not feeling that NBC promo at all - and with the exception of The Voice and Jay Leno don't really recognise a single show.

To be fair you're not in the target audience, which is american people.

I can't really say this is much better than the beeb's christmas effort to be honest, more cringeworthy for me.

A pretty good effort by NBC.

Also, interesting to note (well, maybe not) that NBC are now back on YouTube with their own official channel. I remember a few years ago they closed all their accounts for individual shows etc as they were trying (I think) to go exclusively with Hulu. Obviously they've changed their mind.

30 Rock , The Office , Parks and Recreation , Community , Smash (which premiered the following night), Law & Order: Special Victims Unit , The Voice , The Tonight Show with Jay Leno , Parenthood , Are you there, Chelsea? (new this season), Up all Night (new this season), Celebrity Apprentice (Trump), The Today Show and Saturday Night Live , with Jimmy Fallon of Late Night with Jimmy Fallon tap dancing at the end.

So there would have been quite a number of shows, including The Office, Leno, Fallon, SNL, Today and Law & Order SVU that your average American would probably have recognised, but few of those shows air in any prominent way here. Programmes like Community and 30 Rock have never managed to gather a large audience base (which is why it was interesting NBC framed the whole thing around 30 Rock - it worked because of the context of the show and the characters, which quite a lot of people would probably have missed) and a few were pretty new. I thought it was disappointing they clearly hadn't recorded anything for The Voice - which premiered after Super Bowl - so just shoved in a random clip halfway through.


Watching it, did anyone get the impression some hockey effect was used for some of the 30 Rock scenes? When Jane Krakowski is singing in front of her colleagues, for example, I got the feeling they'd been filmed first, then she was added as another 'layer' with green screen, with Alec Baldwin then added again. If they didn't, they had quite some depth of field to film everyone in focus?!


Edit: Two things I do find interesting in relation to the 'stars' shown are:
How many are from News - if you look at the final shot before the NBC title, you can make out Savannah Guthrie, David Gregory, Kathie Lee & Hoda (Today), Kate Snow, Harry Smith and Lester Holt, in addition to Brian Williams, Ann Curry, Al Roker and Natalie Morales. While NBC does have a larger news operation than some of its competitors, this one promo shows what a reliance NBC has on its news division, which is one of the only things it does that is consistently ahead of competitors. There are meant to be around a hundred NBC 'stars' in this promo, and at least eleven are from News.

What a reliance it has on SNL. In addition to the current cast of SNL - which again is quite big - this also shows how much of the rest of its entertainment division is populated by former SNL castmembers. Tina Fey, Tracy Morgan, Jimmy Fallon, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph are all SNL 'alumni' that are just featured in that video - many other castmembers have stayed on in NBC sitcoms. It's interesting, again, how much NBC relies on a single established show to spawn so many others.

Crikey, long way from Midlands Today....













And before some of the humour bypassed, aspergic members kick off or correct me in their anal fashion, I was joking.

Presumably this is because it's NBC's HQ? It's like the BBC doing the same thing with all their stars around TV Centre - it's an iconic building that people associate with the network

*gasp*


What? Ah, so close, wanted to get all snotty and nasally too. Had my prop glasses which I keep pushing up and squint through and everything.