I knew there were way more important things than basketball, and I was all for canceling everything back in March: in-person school, sports, plays, concerts, conferences, just shut it down. But, in order to hold this line, I had to force myself to stop thinking all the damn time about the interruption of the Milwaukee Bucks’ magical season, the second consecutive MVP season of Giannis Antetokounmpo, their certain progress toward their first NBA Finals in decades. This was supposed to be Milwaukee’s summer, with a long playoff run for the basketball team followed by the Democratic National Convention in the same new arena built for just such moments. Months later, when it was official that the NBA season would resume at Disney World, encased in a quarantined bubble, tears formed in my eyes. From mid-March until the beginning of summer, I watched no live TV. The news was too awful, and sports were all reruns. Since late July, I’ve been watching the Bucks again, and like everything else in America, it’s been strange.
As sports, the competitions from the NBA bubble, like the football (soccer), baseball, and ice hockey games I’ve watched, are more or less the same. But as television shows, as a variety of broadcast media, and as an aesthetic experience made up of images and sounds, the NBA games so far have been a departure from the usual, and nothing feels right. It’s been a bit like another newly familiar experience: getting takeout from a restaurant where you previously would dine in. The food might taste like you remember it, but the sensory and social environment of the meal makes you realize how much context matters. (...)
The NBA bubble games have had a particularly sitcommy feel. The courts at Disney’s Wide World of Sports are walled in on three sides by tall video displays, obscuring whatever seats or walls are beyond the court except for rare glimpses when the director cuts to a camera behind the scorer’s table for a referee’s call. The images almost always stay on one side of the action facing these displays, and unlike the usual games from the before times, there are no camera operators on the court itself under the basket. The visual array is reminiscent of the kind of three-wall sets that television comedies adopted from the stage, with their proscenium effect of positioning the viewer across an invisible fourth wall. In a typical American sitcom, you hear but do not see an audience. Many are recorded with a live audience in the studio, and sometimes begin with a voice-over telling you as much (“Cheers was filmed before a live studio audience”). The combination of the three-wall set and audience audio makes the television comedy much more like theater than many kinds of television (the difference between this aesthetic and the “single-camera” comedy style of shows like The Office often prompts comparisons of the latter to cinema).
The sitcom “laugh track” is an old convention. It has sometimes been held up as the epitome of commercial television’s basically fraudulent nature. In the absence of a live audience, or when the audience isn’t demonstrative in the way the producers would like, the sound track of a comedy can be massaged by sweetening the recording or adding canned laughter. This isn’t that different from an older tradition in live performance of the claque, the audience members hired to applaud. But in any event, the sounds of the audience recreate for the viewer at home a sense of participation in a live event among members of a community who experience the show together. This is true for sports just as much as it is for scripted comedy or late-night variety shows. The audible audience for televised sports is always manipulated to be an accompaniment that suggests the space of a live event. A sports stadium or arena is a big television studio in the first place, a stage for the cameras with a raucous in-person audience. Your ticket gets you into the show as an extra. The sensory pandemonium of the live event is never really captured on TV, the blaring music and sound effects are kept low in the mix to keep the booth broadcasters’ voices loud and centered, and no one shoots a T-shirt cannon in your direction when you’re watching at home. But the crowd is essential to the visual and auditory qualities of sports, and the missing elements in these games from Florida have been a present absence. (...)
The video displays are part of what makes each game have a “home team,” as the imagery conveys the identity of one of the two competitors with the text, colors, and advertisements you would find in their home arena. The displays, expansive like digital billboards, also show images of the home team’s fans, which is a nice touch in theory. But the way this works in practice is bizarre. The low-res webcam images of the individual faces are abstracted against backgrounds that look like arena seats, and these are arrayed in a grid to create a large rectangle of spectators. The images are presumably live, but they could be out of sync for all we know as the fans seldom react to anything in the moment, have no way of feeding off one another, and are not audible. The arena has set up a grade of rows that recede away from the court, and some fans are more visible than others as they are courtside or behind the bench or scorer’s table. The close proximity of fans, separated by no barrier from the stars, is one of the thrills of watching live basketball. These virtual fans are by contrast one big upright surface of blurry, laggy heads, and they are reminiscent of the Hollywood Squares of meeting attendees now all too familiar from Zoom’s gallery view. Like many elements of live television of the past few months, these visuals of the NBA’s bubble games are the optics of a pandemic that has turned our lives inside out. (...)
These bubble games remind us, minute by minute, what life is like now. They afford us the dreamworld of a space where you can safely breathe heavily, unmasked, indoors with nine other players and three refs on the same basketball court. But they also televise this newly risky world of facemasks and six feet, of conversations mediated by plexiglass and video screens. I have felt for the NBA players whose season was abruptly arrested as it was getting good, but now I also envy the careful setup that their filthy rich sports league can afford, while my cash-strapped public university takes its chances and opens its dorms and classrooms without such a luxury of frequent testing and exceptional security.
by Michael Z. Newman, LARB | Read more:
Image: CNN
As sports, the competitions from the NBA bubble, like the football (soccer), baseball, and ice hockey games I’ve watched, are more or less the same. But as television shows, as a variety of broadcast media, and as an aesthetic experience made up of images and sounds, the NBA games so far have been a departure from the usual, and nothing feels right. It’s been a bit like another newly familiar experience: getting takeout from a restaurant where you previously would dine in. The food might taste like you remember it, but the sensory and social environment of the meal makes you realize how much context matters. (...)
The NBA bubble games have had a particularly sitcommy feel. The courts at Disney’s Wide World of Sports are walled in on three sides by tall video displays, obscuring whatever seats or walls are beyond the court except for rare glimpses when the director cuts to a camera behind the scorer’s table for a referee’s call. The images almost always stay on one side of the action facing these displays, and unlike the usual games from the before times, there are no camera operators on the court itself under the basket. The visual array is reminiscent of the kind of three-wall sets that television comedies adopted from the stage, with their proscenium effect of positioning the viewer across an invisible fourth wall. In a typical American sitcom, you hear but do not see an audience. Many are recorded with a live audience in the studio, and sometimes begin with a voice-over telling you as much (“Cheers was filmed before a live studio audience”). The combination of the three-wall set and audience audio makes the television comedy much more like theater than many kinds of television (the difference between this aesthetic and the “single-camera” comedy style of shows like The Office often prompts comparisons of the latter to cinema).The sitcom “laugh track” is an old convention. It has sometimes been held up as the epitome of commercial television’s basically fraudulent nature. In the absence of a live audience, or when the audience isn’t demonstrative in the way the producers would like, the sound track of a comedy can be massaged by sweetening the recording or adding canned laughter. This isn’t that different from an older tradition in live performance of the claque, the audience members hired to applaud. But in any event, the sounds of the audience recreate for the viewer at home a sense of participation in a live event among members of a community who experience the show together. This is true for sports just as much as it is for scripted comedy or late-night variety shows. The audible audience for televised sports is always manipulated to be an accompaniment that suggests the space of a live event. A sports stadium or arena is a big television studio in the first place, a stage for the cameras with a raucous in-person audience. Your ticket gets you into the show as an extra. The sensory pandemonium of the live event is never really captured on TV, the blaring music and sound effects are kept low in the mix to keep the booth broadcasters’ voices loud and centered, and no one shoots a T-shirt cannon in your direction when you’re watching at home. But the crowd is essential to the visual and auditory qualities of sports, and the missing elements in these games from Florida have been a present absence. (...)
The video displays are part of what makes each game have a “home team,” as the imagery conveys the identity of one of the two competitors with the text, colors, and advertisements you would find in their home arena. The displays, expansive like digital billboards, also show images of the home team’s fans, which is a nice touch in theory. But the way this works in practice is bizarre. The low-res webcam images of the individual faces are abstracted against backgrounds that look like arena seats, and these are arrayed in a grid to create a large rectangle of spectators. The images are presumably live, but they could be out of sync for all we know as the fans seldom react to anything in the moment, have no way of feeding off one another, and are not audible. The arena has set up a grade of rows that recede away from the court, and some fans are more visible than others as they are courtside or behind the bench or scorer’s table. The close proximity of fans, separated by no barrier from the stars, is one of the thrills of watching live basketball. These virtual fans are by contrast one big upright surface of blurry, laggy heads, and they are reminiscent of the Hollywood Squares of meeting attendees now all too familiar from Zoom’s gallery view. Like many elements of live television of the past few months, these visuals of the NBA’s bubble games are the optics of a pandemic that has turned our lives inside out. (...)
These bubble games remind us, minute by minute, what life is like now. They afford us the dreamworld of a space where you can safely breathe heavily, unmasked, indoors with nine other players and three refs on the same basketball court. But they also televise this newly risky world of facemasks and six feet, of conversations mediated by plexiglass and video screens. I have felt for the NBA players whose season was abruptly arrested as it was getting good, but now I also envy the careful setup that their filthy rich sports league can afford, while my cash-strapped public university takes its chances and opens its dorms and classrooms without such a luxury of frequent testing and exceptional security.
by Michael Z. Newman, LARB | Read more:
Image: CNN
