Gamified fun: Channel 5 on its NFL Big Game Night ambitions with Hungry Bear Media

On Channel 5’s NFL: Big Game Night, Dermot O’Leary, Sam Quek and Osi Umenyiora host the coverage, which includes a play-along entertainment format aimed at family audiences

British broadcaster Channel 5’s new Big Game Night programme is a mash up of live NFL games, comedy and entertainment, in a studio-based gameshow format. It sounds mad, and perhaps it is, but viewers are flocking to the programme and making it a core part of their Sunday night TV ritual, according to Channel 5 commissioning editor for non-scripted UK originals Daniel Louw.

Earlier this year, Channel 5 and Paramount UK announced a major new multi-year partnership with the NFL and CBS Sports to bring live coverage of the NFL season free-to-air to UK viewers.

Every week throughout the NFL season, two Sunday evening games are being broadcast, the first at 6pm on 5 and the second at 9pm on 5Action, which has been branded as 5NFL for game nights, with both games also streamed live. The broadcaster is also set to show the Super Bowl free-to-air in the UK.

On NFL: Big Game Night, Dermot O’Leary, Sam Quek and Osi Umenyiora host the coverage, which includes a play-along entertainment format aimed at family audiences.

Speaking to SVG Europe, Louw says: “While we do have some pedigree on NFL, this time round, partly through discussions with CBS, there was an opportunity to potentially do something big and interesting and different.

“We’ve been doing a lot more sport the last year or so; we’ve done the Club World Cup, we’ve done various bits of snooker and boxing and we’re looking to do more of that. When this opportunity [for NFL: Big Game Night show] came along, I was asked, “what would you do if Channel Five were to try to offer something that’s basically a bit different from the Sky Sports coverage, which is catering much more to the kind of hardcore NFL fan?”. And I thought it’s an interesting challenge.”

Hungry Bear Media, the entertainment production company behind Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel and Big Show and Gladiators, is behind Channel 5’s Big Game Night

Now for something different

To do something truly different, Louw spoke to Hungry Bear Media, the entertainment production company behind Michael McIntyre’s The Wheel and Big Show and Gladiators. He notes: “I wanted to speak to at least one company who have never done anything quite like this before, and that ended up being Hungry Bear. Lo and behold, they got the gig because they were pitching something that is so significantly different to anything that I had heard in the sports arena before.”

Louw notes that US-style sports shows are becoming much more prevalent and interesting to viewers. “I think also we’re living in an age where, I wouldn’t say the rule book is being ripped up, but sports coverage is changing quite a lot,” continues Louw.

“You have RedZone on the NFL, which is now becoming almost as big of product as the live games themselves. And then you’ve got Golazo [CBS Sports Golazo Network, a 24 hour D2C streaming network dedicated exclusively to soccer coverage]. I think Golazo on CBS is not so fundamentally different from what you might see on Soccer Saturday on Sky, but I think generally it’s pushing towards a direction that people are starting to watch sports a bit differently; they’re starting to watch multiple games at once rather than what we were doing before, so the slightly more static, discursive, analytical version of sports is still going to be around, but I feel like we’re moving into an area where it’s just kind a bit more sort of hyped, a bit more frenetic. And Big Game Night is a little bit of an attempt to try and harness that kind of energy.”

On the American penchant for showmanship and entertainment during its live games, be they NFL, baseball or hockey, Louw says, “TV broadcast is beginning to replicate this in-stadium experience, and as much as it’s frenetic, it’s filling the gaps [in play] very well”.

He goes on: “That’s what we thought Big Game Night could do. The barrier to entry for a lot of people for the NFL really is that they think, “oh it is not for me, it’s too ‘stop start'”. We thought, “well what if we make the stops as good as the starts, or make people potentially tune in for [the stops] as well?”. And that’s effectively the spirit in which [the programme] was created. When Hungry Bear First suggested that, I thought, I haven’t heard that idea before, but it does feel like it’s in the spirit of the game.”

US-style sports shows are becoming much more prevalent and interesting to British viewers according to Channel 5’s commissioning editor, Daniel Louw

Feeding a hungry bear

Hungry Bear has proven to be the right choice for this programme, notes Louw: “Fundamentally, I was interested in talking to them just because everyone I know who’s worked with them has had a really great experience. People said that they’re creative and people told me that they’d never stop coming up with ideas, and that has turned out to be true. So it was a good opportunity to start a new relationship.

“I’d never met anyone at Hungry Bear before, and now we’ve done probably about 120-plus hours of live broadcasting together and there’ll probably be about another 40 to 50-odd more before the end of the Super Bowl,” adds Louw. “So I’ve spent a lot of time in the trenches with these guys now, and it’s been a lot of fun. It’s been a learning experience, but their freshness and apparent lack of experience in this area was something that was attractive. But they’ve learned quickly and they’ve hired the right people.”

Once Hungry Bear had been bought on board, Louw says he then needed to, “get them to try to follow the rule book as much as you possibly can”.

He continues: “They then had to hire people who are very experienced in NFL production. You do need people who have worked in this environment before and who do know what they’re doing. But really it’s been interesting. The staffing on this has been a hybrid of really experienced NFL hands, and people who know the game and people who make Gladiators and the Wheel and the other great Hungry Bear shows.”

Big Game Night is unlike any other studio-based sports programme on TV right now, and it is potentially more complicated as well, with the ‘stop start’ nature of the game and ad breaks from both the host broadcaster and Channel 5.

Explains Louw: What we’re trying to do is really difficult. I do a lot of different stuff, but I’ve done some sports broadcasting, I’ve done podcasts, I’ve worked on the Channel 4 NFL show in the past, which tended to be highlights. But the live studio show, particularly with the NFL, is really complicated because you’re having to listen to the truck for when they’re potentially about to go to ad breaks and so on; you can’t just predict it. You effectively have to listen to what the American host broadcaster is about to do and respond accordingly.

“I mean it is in theory an absolute logistical nightmare,” laughs Louw. “We also have to fit in Channel 5 breaks in as well, so that’s difficult. We then have a show at 9.25pm, our second show, which Sam and Osi host having left the main studio and gone into a smaller studio to host a much more traditional football show that covers the second game of the night. That’s much easier. That show is wildly easier to make than Big Game Night. It’s a classic of sports wraparound production, but we’ve tried to be more ambitious with that as well; we’ve tried to make it feel like it’s very different from what Sky’s offering.”

NFL: Big Game Night’s hosts, Sam Quek, Dermot O’Leary, and Osi Umenyiora

Gamified fun

Big Game Night is 50% a traditional studio sports show where the presenters throw to the main featured game, and 50% a comedy entertainment gameshow.

There are a multitude of choices of entertainment to shift to in the multiple breaks within a game, says Louw: “We have a live gameshow, largely physical, sometimes a trivia-based, where we play rounds of a contest that mirrors the game that we’ve got featured.

“So if for example you have the Jacksonville Jaguars and the Indianapolis Colts, we have got two teams [of guests] in the studio who mirror those two NFL teams, so we’ve got a team of Jaguars fans and we’ve got a team of Colts fans and they’re competing against each other for an opportunity to win a prize, a holiday to an American city. The way that they do that is if their team has the ball in the [live] game, then they will potentially have the advantage the next time we come back from a break and play another game. So you are basically rooting for your team to do well in the game, and if your team is doing well in the game, then you are going to have more opportunities to score more points, that increase your chances of going on that holiday in the first place. It’s a really clever and odd idea.”

Flexibility within all the games is key, so they can run for 30 seconds or several minutes depending on play stoppage time or the length of an ad break. Says Louw: “They’re all games that shouldn’t outstay their welcome in two minutes. They provide a nice little distraction and then suddenly we’re back to the game.

“Finding that balance of just the right level of fun distraction before we go back to the game has been interesting and difficult, but I feel that we’ve got there. It is a complicated, difficult show to make, but I think it’s starting to feel a lot more seamless from a production point of view and hopefully from a viewing point of view as well.”

Sunday night routine

At first the hardcore NFL fans were not keen on Big Game Night, however they are starting to come round, says Louw. “We had a bit of indifference and a little bit of mild rejection to begin with from the NFL hardcore, which is understandable. We expected that. But now I think people feel like it’s part of their Sunday night routine and we’re getting people writing directly to the channel, praising the presenters, saying they like this particular kind of game.”

The viewership for the show is families, providing a fun introduction to the NFL for people that would not normally put an American football game on TV. Louw says: “We want it to be a big broad entertainment brand that people, who wouldn’t normally have a couple of hours of NFL on in the house, will put on.

“Ultimately it’s providing an entry level programme that appeals both to the hardcore fans and their partners, for people who want to get their kids and other members of the family into it, and who feel this is just a place they want to be.”

Concludes Louw: “I think really we’re trying to a certain extent to hark back to that golden age in the 1980’s a little bit, where it just felt like this is something you wanted to be part of and is the invitation to a really massive party, and hopefully it is doing that for some people. It’s been a long, hard road, but I it feels a little bit like people are becoming quite protective and evangelical about it now, and that’s really what we wanted.”

NFL: Big Game Night coverage on 5 kicks off at 5.30pm on game nights, hosted by Dermot O’Leary, with Sam Quek and double-Super Bowl winner Osi Umenyiora.