Culture
Taylor Swift at the Super Bowl would be a 'gift from the gods' for CBS' broadcast
Fred Gaudelli has been the lead producer of the Super Bowl television broadcast on seven different occasions. If you are into Roman numerals, Gaudelli has produced Super Bowls XXXVII, XL, XLIII, XLVI, XLIX, LII, and LVI. He has been in the production truck for some of the most exciting NFL title games in history, including Super Bowl XLIX in 2015, which featured New England Patriots rookie cornerback Malcolm Butler intercepting Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson at the goal line with 20 seconds left to seal New England’s 28-24 come-from-behind win over Seattle. That game averaged 114.4 million viewers, which ranked as the most-viewed Super Bowl in U.S. television history before last year’s Super Bowl took the title.
During his 33 seasons as the lead producer for an NFL prime-time TV game, which included stops at ABC, ESPN, NBC, and Amazon Prime Video, Gaudelli has produced innumerable NFL games with famous people in the stands. How would he feel about the prospect of Taylor Swift attending Super Bowl LVIII in Las Vegas on Feb. 11 if he were producing the game?
“I would consider it a gift from the gods,” said Gaudelli.
Gaudelli, because he lives on Planet Earth, knows that Swift crosses over into popular culture and that means the potential for more eyeballs on the product. (If you are a Swift hater, this piece is going to be a cruel summer for you, and it’s best to bail out now.)
The challenge for the CBS Sports production team for Super Bowl LVIII, if Swift does make it to the game to watch boyfriend Travis Kelce and the Kansas City Chiefs take on the San Francisco 49ers — is navigating how often you incorporate images of the singer into the broadcast.
The good news for the crew — led by producer Jim Rikhoff, director Mike Arnold and replay producer Ryan Galvin — is that they’ve had the Chiefs plenty this year, including the divisional-round game in Buffalo and AFC Championship Game in Baltimore, both of which Swift attended. It would be editorial dereliction not to show Swift during the game, but at the same time, how much do you show her?
Then there is a new question: How much does the Super Bowl, a game that includes millions of people who are first-time football viewers for that season, impact your decisions on showing her?
“Let’s go to the last Super Bowl I did,” Gaudelli said of the Los Angeles Rams’ win over the Cincinnati Bengals on Feb. 13, 2022. “We had (Rams quarterback) Matthew Stafford, his wife and kids. We had (Bengals quarterback) Joe Burrow’s parents and girlfriend. We had (Rams wide receiver) Cooper Kupp’s wife. We had (Rams offensive lineman) Andrew Whitworth’s wife and kids. We had (Bengals wide receiver) Ja’Marr Chase’s mom and dad. You have these shots set up because they’re part of the story of the game and because there’s five times as many people (watching) as you would get for a normal game. Right off the bat, you’re already thinking about who’s at the game, and in L.A. we had celebrities like LeBron James and Jay-Z. (Director) Drew Esocoff was cutting those shots during the game. So when Stafford threw a touchdown pass, there’s a shot of Stafford’s wife. Burrow is on the ground writhing in pain? You see his mom and dad and his girlfriend with the ultimate look of concern.
“Now you have Taylor Swift, who also is someone that has a direct connection to the game because she’s a significant other of one of the stars of a team. Maybe you don’t show her for every Kelce sequence, but she’s going to be part of sequences when he makes a play.”
The airtime Swift has gotten so far during NFL games is much less than some think. New York Times writer Benjamin Hoffman wrote a great piece this week that chronicled “the dissonance between how many times Swift has been shown versus how many times people seem to think she was shown.” He reported Swift was on-screen for a duration of less than 32 seconds in most games, with a high of 1 minute and 16 seconds for Peacock’s coverage of the Chiefs against the Miami Dolphins on Jan. 13.
“You can’t help but put her on the air,” said Tracy Wolfson, who will be on the Chiefs’ sideline for the Super Bowl. “I can’t tell you the amount of dads who have come up to me and said, ‘My daughter is now watching football because of Taylor Swift.’ I mean, why wouldn’t you take advantage or capitalize on it? It’s great for the NFL and it’s great for ratings.”
Fox’s broadcast of the Chiefs’ game against the Chicago Bears on Sept. 24 set the template for Swift coverage because the network had to figure out everything on the fly. Lead producer Richie Zyontz said that his crew had no official word from the NFL or the Chiefs that Swift would be in attendance. (That changed in later weeks; Rikhoff knew the night before the Chiefs-Bills game Swift would be there.) They had to figure out the camera operators to use for the shots as well as how many to use.
“We were in uncharted waters having been the first to deal with the situation,” Zyontz said this week, reflecting on that game. “Moderation came to mind immediately. As the season progressed there were too many knee-jerk reaction shots, yet those were the shots that were talked about and written about on Monday. For the Super Bowl, there will be millions of new viewers because of her. Hopefully, good judgment will prevail. But for those who complain, come on, it’s a few seconds at a time, a few times a game. Is that really egregious?”
“You can’t help but put her on the air,” Tracy Wolfson, who will be working the Chiefs’ sideline at the Super Bowl for the CBS broadcast, says of Taylor Swift. (Jason Hanna / Getty Images)
The Super Bowl will be very different. If Swift is at the game, the Chiefs and the NFL will know what suite Swift will be sitting in at the stadium. So there will be no issues for the CBS broadcast production in finding her. CBS will put a request in to interview the singer. (If there is a prop bet on Swift being interviewed on camera, I’d bet no.) Gaudelli said a production’s best shot would be to go through the Chiefs who would relay the request to her through Kelce. You’d also make the ask to see if she wanted to do something off-camera.
“We didn’t put that request in during the season because we didn’t think it rose to that level at that point,” said Gaudelli, who now serves as executive producer for NBC’s NFL coverage. “But, yeah, I think you put that in for the Super Bowl. You would try to get her on the pregame show.”
Expect some guaranteed visuals in the postgame. If the Chiefs win, there will be a CBS camera operator following Kelce, for certain.
“As a producer and director, he’s one of the main guys you want to see at the end of the game because he’s a major part of his dynasty if they win,” Gaudelli said. “So where he is, she will be. You don’t really have to go hunting too far. You’re going to be looking for number 87.”
One person who is watching all of this with total amusement is Ian Eagle, the CBS broadcaster who was the first NFL national broadcaster to acknowledge the Swift-Kelce connection. On a Kelce touchdown call during Kansas City’s 17-9 win over Jacksonville on Sept. 17, Eagle cheekily tossed in a “Kelce finds a blank space for the score” line, referencing a Swift song title.
“Kelce finds a blank space for the score.”
Ian Eagle sneaking a reference into this Travis Kelce touchdown call 👀
🎥 @NFLpic.twitter.com/pQNiqZdh88
— The Athletic (@TheAthletic) September 17, 2023
“Back in September, there were some stories popping up linking Travis to Taylor, but it wasn’t getting major coverage at that point,” Eagle said. “When Kelce scored a touchdown in Jacksonville, I tossed in, ‘He finds a Blank Space for the score’ as a lark. I thought it was a cute throwaway line, not imagining for a moment it would blow up. I learned about the power of Swift in a hurry, and all of these months later the interest has grown exponentially with this Chiefs run. The NFL was already immense. But the relationship has somehow created even more buzz for the league. I’m just happy for those two crazy kids.”
GO DEEPER
How Taylor Swift could get to the Super Bowl from her Eras Tour
(Top photo of Taylor Swift and her boyfriend: Patrick Smith / Getty Images)
Whatever you do, don’t think of a bird.
Now: What kind of bird are you not thinking about? A pigeon? A bald eagle? Something more poetic, like a skylark or a nightingale? In any case, would you say that this bird you aren’t thinking about is real?
Before you answer, read this poem, which is quite literally about not thinking of a bird.
Human consciousness is full of riddles. Neuroscientists, philosophers and dorm-room stoners argue continually about what it is and whether it even exists. For Wallace Stevens, the experience of having a mind was a perpetual source of wonder, puzzlement and delight — perfectly ordinary and utterly transcendent at the same time. He explored the mysteries and pleasures of consciousness in countless poems over the course of his long poetic career. It was arguably his great theme.
Stevens was born in 1879 and published his first book, “Harmonium,” in 1923, making him something of a late bloomer among American modernists. For much of his adult life, he worked as an executive for the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, rising to the rank of vice president. He viewed insurance less as a day job to support his poetry than as a parallel vocation. He pursued both activities with quiet diligence, spending his days at the office and composing poems in his head as he walked to and from work.
As a young man, Stevens dreamed of traveling to Europe, though he never crossed the Atlantic. In middle age he made regular trips to Florida, and his poems are frequently infused with ideas of Paris and Rome and memories of Key West. Others partake of the stringent beauty of New England. But the landscapes he explores, wintry or tropical, provincial or cosmopolitan, are above all mental landscapes, created by and in the imagination.
Are those worlds real?
Let’s return to the palm tree and its avian inhabitant, in that tranquil Key West sunset of the mind.
Until then, we find consolation in fangles.
When the director Rob Reiner cast his leads in the 1986 film “Stand by Me,” he looked for young actors who were as close as possible to the personalities of the four children they’d be playing. There was the wise beyond his years kid from a rough family (River Phoenix), the slightly dim worrywart (Jerry O’Connell), the cutup with a temper (Corey Feldman) and the sensitive, bookish boy.
Wil Wheaton was perfect for that last one, Gordie Lachance, a doe-eyed child who is ignored by his family in favor of his late older brother. Now, 40 years later, he’s traveling the country to attend anniversary screenings of the film, alongside O’Connell and Feldman, which has thrown him back into the turmoil that he felt as an adolescent.
Wheaton has channeled those emotions and his on-set memories into his latest project: narrating a new audiobook version of “The Body,” the 1982 Stephen King novella on which the film was based.
A few years ago, Wheaton started to float the idea of returning to the story that gave him his big break — that of a quartet of boys in 1959 Oregon, in their last days before high school, setting out to find a classmate’s dead body. “I’ve been telling the story of ‘Stand By Me’ since I was 12 years old,” he said.
But this time was different. Wheaton, who has narrated dozens of audiobooks, including Andy Weir’s “The Martian” and Ernest Cline’s “Ready Player One,” says he has come to enjoy narration more than screen acting. “I’m safe, I’m in the booth, nobody’s looking at me and I can just tell you a story.”
The fact that he, an older man looking back on his younger years, is narrating a story about an older man looking back on his younger years, is not lost on Wheaton. King’s original story is bathed in nostalgia. Coming to terms with death and loss is one of its primary themes.
Two days after appearing on stage at the Academy Awards as part of a tribute to Reiner — who was murdered in 2025 alongside his wife, Michele — Wheaton got on the phone to talk about recording the audiobook, reliving his favorite scenes from the film and reexamining a quintessential story of childhood loss through the lens of his own.
This interview has been edited and condensed.
“I felt really close to him, and my memory of him.”
Wheaton on channeling a co-star’s performance.
There’s this wonderful scene in “Stand By Me.” Gordie and Chris are walking down the tracks talking about junior high. Chris is telling Gordie, “I wish to hell I was your dad, because I care about you, and he obviously doesn’t.”
It’s just so honest and direct, in a way that kids talk to each other that adults don’t. And I think that one of the reasons that really sticks with people, and that piece really lands on a lot of audiences, and has for 40 years, is, just too many people have been Gordie in that scene.
That scene is virtually word for word taken from the text of the book. And when I was narrating that, I made a deliberate choice to do my best to recreate what River did in that scene.
“You’re just a kid,
Gordie–”
“I wish to fuck
I was your father!”
he said angrily.
“You wouldn’t go around
talking about takin those stupid shop courses if I was!
It’s like
God gave you something,
all those stories
you can make up, and He said:
This is what we got for you, kid.
Try not to lose it.
But kids lose everything
unless somebody looks out for them and if your folks
are too fucked up to do it
then maybe I ought to.”
I watched that scene a couple of times because I really wanted — I don’t know why it was so important to me to — well, I know: because I loved him, and I miss him. And I wanted to bring him into this as best as I could, right?
So I was reading that scene, and the words are identical to the script. And I had this very powerful flashback to being on the train tracks that day in Cottage Grove, Oregon. And I could see River standing next to them. They’re shooting my side of the scene and there’s River, right next to the camera, doing his off-camera dialogue, and there’s the sound guy, and there’s the boom operator. There’s my key light.
I could hear and feel it. It was the weirdest thing. It’s like I was right back there.
I was able to really take in the emotional memory of being Gordie in all of those scenes. So when I was narrating him and I’m me and I’m old with all of this experience, I just drew on what I remembered from being that little boy and what I remember of those friendships and what they meant to me and what they mean to me today.
“Rob gave me a gift. Rob gave me a career.”
Wheaton recalls the “Stand By Me” director’s way with kids on set, as well as his recent Oscars tribute.
Rob really encouraged us to be kids.
Jerry tells the most amazing story about that scene, where we were all sitting around, and doing our bit, and he improvised. He was just goofing around — we were just playing — and he said something about spitting water at the fat kid.
We get to the end of the scene, and he hears Rob. Rob comes around from behind the thing, and he goes, “Jerry!” And Jerry thinks, “Oh no, I’m in trouble. I’m in trouble because I improvised, and I’m not supposed to improvise.”
The context for Jerry is that he had been told by the adults in his life, “Sit on your hands and shut up. Stop trying to be a cutup. Stop trying to be funny. Stop disrupting people. Just be quiet.” And Jerry thinks, “Oh my God. I didn’t shut up. I’m in trouble. I’m gonna get fired.”
Rob leans in to all of us, and Rob says, “Hey, guys, do you see that? More of that. Do that!”
The whole time when you’re a kid actor, you’re just around all these adults who are constantly telling you to grow up. They’re mad that you’re being a kid. Rob just created an environment where not only was it supported that we would be kids — and have fun, and follow those kid instincts and do what was natural — it was expected. It was encouraged. We were supposed to do it.
They chanted together:
“I don’t shut up,
I grow up.
And when I look at you I throw up.”
“Then your mother goes around the corner
and licks it up,”
I said, and hauled ass out of there,
giving them the finger over my shoulder as I went.
I never had any friends later on
like the ones I had when I was twelve.
Jesus, did you?
When we were at the Oscars, I looked at Jerry. And we looked at this remarkable assemblage of the most amazingly talented, beautiful artists and storytellers. We looked around, and Jerry leans down, and he said, “We all got our start with Rob Reiner. He trusted every single one of us.”
And to stand there for him, when I really thought that I would be standing with him to talk about this stuff — it was a lot.
“I was really really really excited — like jumping up and down.”
The scene Wheaton was most looking forward to narrating: the tale of Lard Ass Hogan.
I was so excited to narrate it. It’s a great story! It’s a funny story. It’s such a lovely break — it’s an emotional and tonal shift from what’s happening in the movie.
I know this as a writer: You work to increase and release tension throughout a narrative, and Stephen King uses humor really effectively to release that tension. But it also raises the stakes, because we have these moments of joy and these moments of things being very silly in the midst of a lot of intensity.
That’s why the story of Lard Ass Hogan is so fun for me to tell. Because in the middle of that, we stop to do something that’s very, very fun, and very silly and very celebratory.
“Will you shut up and let him tell it?”
Teddy hollered.
Vern blinked.
“Sure. Yeah.
Okay.”
“Go on, Gordie,”
Chris said. “It’s not really much—”
“Naw,
we don’t expect much from a wet end like you,”
Teddy said,
“but tell it anyway.”
I cleared my throat. “So anyway.
It’s Pioneer Days,
and on the last night
they have these three big events.
There’s an egg-roll for the little kids and a sack-race for kids that are like eight or nine,
and then there’s the pie-eating contest.
And the main guy of the story
is this fat kid nobody likes
named Davie Hogan.”
When I narrate this story — whenever there is a moment of levity or humor, whenever there are those brief little moments that are the seasoning of the meal that makes it all so real and relatable — yes, it was very important to me to capture those moments.
I’m shifting in my chair, so I can feel each of those characters. It’s something that doesn’t exist in live action. It doesn’t exist in any other media.
“I feel the loss.”
Wheaton remembers River Phoenix.
The novella “The Body” is very much about Gordie remembering Chris. It’s darker, and it’s more painful, than the movie is.
I’ve been watching the movie on this tour and seeing River a lot. I remember him as a 14- and 15-year-old kid who just seemed so much older, and so much more experienced and so much wiser than me, and I’m only a year younger than him.
What hurts me now, and what I really felt when I was narrating this, is knowing what River was going through then. We didn’t know. I still don’t know the extent of how he was mistreated, but I know that he was. I know that adults failed him. That he should have been protected in every way that matters. And he just wasn’t.
And I, like Gordie, remember a boy who was loving. So loving, and generous and cared deeply about everyone around him, all the time. Who deserved to live a full life. Who had so much to offer the world. And it’s so unfair that he’s gone and taken from us. I had to go through a decades-long grieving process to come to terms with him dying.
Near the end
of 1971,
Chris
went into a Chicken Delight in Portland
to get a three-piece Snack Bucket.
Just ahead of him,
two men started arguing
about which one had been first in line. One of them pulled a knife.
Chris,
who had always been the best of us
at making peace,
stepped between them and was stabbed in the throat.
The man with the knife had spent time in four different institutions;
he had been released from Shawshank State Prison
only the week before.
Chris died almost instantly.
It is a privilege that I was allowed to tell this story. I get to tell Gordie Lachance’s story as originally imagined by Stephen King, with all of the experience of having lived my whole adult life with the memory of spending three months in Gordie Lachance’s skin.
Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights offbeat television shows that began as comic books. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the comics and their screen versions.
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