Culture
Welcome to the 'Doink Cam': How CBS' Super Bowl TV innovation came to life
Harrison Butker has earned his reputation as one of the NFL’s great kickers. The two-time Super Bowl champion has made all 14 of his kicks in the Kansas City Chiefs’ postseason victories this season and has become as dependable in his art as Stephen Curry is at his.
But in a bit of great irony, it was a Butker missed field goal at last year’s Super Bowl that prompted an epiphany from Jason Cohen, a CBS Sports vice president of remote technical operations.
With 2:24 left in the opening quarter of Super Bowl LVII between the Chiefs and Philadelphia Eagles, Butker’s 42-yard field goal attempt smashed the top of the left upright at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Ariz. (Said Fox broadcaster Kevin Burkhardt in describing the play: “So a good drive ends with the ‘doink!’”)
The kick is no good, still a tie game.
📺: #SBLVII on FOX
📱: Stream on NFL+ https://t.co/d8gBDzRt2m pic.twitter.com/VzXUvUzSa0— NFL (@NFL) February 13, 2023
It just so happened that Cohen and Mike Francis, a vice president of engineering and technology at CBS Sports, were sitting in the end zone where the kick was missed. As the sound of the miss reverberated in their section, Cohen and Francis looked at each other with excitement.
“The ball ricocheted off the pole and made this very loud sound — a ‘doink,’” Cohen recalled this week. “We looked at each other and I said, ‘We need a camera in the uprights.’”
Immediately after Butker’s miss, Cohen texted NFL’s senior director of broadcasting, Blake Jones, who was, well, working. He excitedly told Jones that he wanted to place a camera in the uprights at this year’s Super Bowl when CBS was airing the game. An amused Jones texted Cohen back immediately and said they should talk after the Super Bowl.
Months of planning and testing has produced a set of “doink” cameras for Sunday’s game. The CBS broadcast will feature six total 4K cameras that have been inserted into the Allegiant Stadium uprights of both end zones. Two of the cameras on each upright are positioned to face out to the field on a 45-degree angle. Another faces directly inward to get a side profile shot of the ball as it flies through. They have high-resolution zoom capabilities and super slow-motion replay capabilities. CBS will be able to get fantastic replays of any field goal or extra point, but the dream will be if someone hits the post for the doink.
“The doink camera isn’t just if it hits the upright,” said CBS Sports executive producer and executive vice president of production Harold Bryant. “If there is a field goal that’s tight, we have three different angles on each upright, so we can see it in three different positions.”
Immediately after he texted Jones, Cohen started digging around the internet and found a company, Sportsfield Specialities, that designs and manufactures sports construction equipment including football goalposts. He sent in a LinkedIn request during the game to the company’s director of sales. Cohen and his team ultimately spent months composing engineering drawings and schematics to make sure that the integrity of the uprights would not be compromised. Sportsfield helped CBS with the engineering of the pole and cutting holes. Cohen said Fletcher Sports, a speciality camera-capture company that often works with CBS Sports, designed the inserts that go into the uprights and figured out how to make the cameras fit.
The proof of concept initially came in a preseason game between the New York Jets and Tampa Bay Buccaneers on Aug. 19 at MetLife Stadium. Cohen and his group consulted with kicking analyst Jay Feely to get his perspective on where he thought might be a good place for the cameras.
“We presented our ideas early enough on this where we had a preseason plan,” Cohen said. “The NFL had time to evaluate the plan, and then come back to us with their feedback after the preseason test.”
The next live test came at Allegiant Stadium in October for a Week 6 game between the New England Patriots and Las Vegas Raiders. There had been plenty of trial and error to get to this point, but the doink cameras made their television debut for a successful kick.
Ryan Galvin, the lead replay producer for this year’s Super Bowl, explained how the process of a doink camera replay getting on the air would work in practical terms. At the Super Bowl, production specialist Amanda Smerage will run the machine that controls the six cameras from the uprights. They call it “DOINK” in the production truck. Steve McKee, who normally produces the team of Andrew Catalon, Matt Ryan and Tiki Barber but is working as a replay producer for this year’s Super Bowl, will monitor those cameras. He will alert Galvin if DOINK produces something memorable.
Doink Cam fits inside the uprights to give a unique view of field-goal and extra-point attempts. CBS will have three of them in each goalpost. (Courtesy of Jason Cohen)
Galvin, who has 60-something replay feeds at his disposal, ultimately has to decide what replays to use, including the doink cameras, in real-time throughout the game. Galvin loves the technology but is quick to point out that ultimately you have to produce the game in front of you and rely on the people around you.
“A brand-new look for the viewer can be tricky,” said Galvin, who will work his seventh Super Bowl. “Will it be slightly confusing? Can people ‘get it’ in six seconds? I’m not smart enough to answer that. I know that Jason Cohen and our entire operations team work incredibly hard to fill a toolbox of cameras and replay machines for our crew. My job is to get the best replay on the air when appropriate.”
Jones said that the NFL is always trying to identify the next broadcast innovation. For instance, pylon cam is now standard for major NFL games across all the broadcast partners. The Super Bowl often lends the opportunity to do something unique, and sometimes what debuts at a Super Bowl can become a standard in-game production.
Ultimately, such broadcast innovations are dictated by the networks because they are the ones that have to invest the budget and research and development. If the viewing public immediately falls in love with a certain camera, the NFL’s other media partners would certainly take notice.
“It used to be that sky cam was something you would only see at the big prime-time games,” Jones said. “Now that’s going into the more regular Sunday afternoon games. We’ll learn a lot after this week. In the end, these are network decisions that we’re supporting and facilitating rather than necessarily saying you have to have cameras X, Y, and Z. This one is a pretty unique use case, and you need a certain part of the game to happen a certain way to get that ‘wow’ factor. It’ll be interesting to see how it all plays out.”
“There is no history to go off of as to what is the perfect camera to catch the perfect doink,” Cohen said. “A part of this is going to be luck. Where will a ball possibly strike? What I’ll tell you is that we put cameras in different positions for the preseason game in August and the game in October where we looked at every possible angle, trying to see what the pros and cons were. … What we came up with is what we think are the right height, angle and wide-angle lens.”
A Doink Cam in place and ready to go inside a goalpost, with Plexiglass cover. (Courtesy of Jason Cohen)
Cohen said what testing revealed was it’s not just about the image of the football coming toward viewers, but viewers also needed to see the other goal post as a frame of reference to see if the ball went through or not. Sportsfield Specialities was able to get the cameras where CBS wanted them through custom fitting. There is a camera cylinder tube with a piece of unbreakable Plexiglass that gets slid into the pole through a back opening of the upright. “Think of it like there’s like a little door or a chamber in the back of the upright, and this little camera slot gets kind of inserted inward,” Cohen said. “Then a piece of Plexiglass that’s curved and gets pushed forward so that it’s completely flush with the rest of the upright.”
The doink cameras and proper wiring were placed inside the Allegiant Stadium uprights on Wednesday. Testing was scheduled for Thursday night, when the final field installation happens. There will also be a run-through on Friday. Cohen said he will be sitting in one of the CBS production trucks on Super Bowl Sunday with other CBS brass. He admits he’s rooting for a doink.
“Look, you never root for someone else’s misery, and I don’t want to put bad karma on the world and hope that field-goal kickers don’t do their job,” Cohen said. “But this is the kind of innovation that if someone hits the post and our cameras get a great look, it’s going to make us really feel happy about all of the work and effort we put into inventing this angle. So as they line up for kicks on Sunday, I’m definitely going to be holding my breath a bit.”
GO DEEPER
Super Bowl broadcast Q&A: Jim Nantz, Tony Romo and Tracy Wolfson on the big game
(Top photo of a monitor showing the view from “Doink Cam” during a test at a preseason game between the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and New York Jets: Courtesy of Jason Cohen)
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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