Alternative NFL Playoff broadcast presentations have been all the rage in this wild card round. The Nickelodeon/CBS Partnership only grew stronger, with an actually very good game this year, and the brothers Manning (sans Cooper) will, for the first time, host one of their trademark Monday Night Football commentary sessions from their respective living rooms tonight. It makes sense that we could’ve done it differently, though, right?
How is it that only Spongebob Squarepants and Eli Manning were deemed valuable alternative commentators of the National Football League? Wouldn’t it make sense, in an alternate timeline, for other ?
We here at JoeBush.net have partnered with Xplore4D, a very real company that absolutely changed the time travel game. Through a complicated system that I don’t want to go into because I don’t want the third paragraph of this post to be too big and also because it’s a made up thing I did for pretend for the sake of this post, Xplore4D has offered us the technology to tap into alternate timelines created in the timeline splitting explained by the Many-world Interpretation of Quantum Physics that I heard about on YouTube one time in order to access phenomena from those timelines. Through their technology, we here at JoeBush.net have been able to extract clips from alternate timelines wherein the NFL hosted alternative broadcast with different, alternative programmers, and we’re pleased to share them with you now!
Weatherscan
Weatherscan, a spin-off of The Weather Channel, is the current and longest-ever-running holder of the “ideal television channel” championship belt. No human presence, nobody standing in front of a screen telling you anything, just a few representative graphics showing your part of the country set to synth and saxophone music that vaporwave artists have probably mined for countless albums.
In one alternate timeline, the NFL partnered with Weatherscan to broadcast this postseason game, while keeping the rest of the weather information flowing for the sake of utility. If it looks like footage taken from Super Bowl XII that’s because everything looks like that in that timeline. It’s a way different timeline from ours.
The Prevue Channel
Though it’s proven obsolete in the modern day thanks to the invention of the guide software included in cable and satellite boxes since about the turn of the millennium, the Prevue Channel in this alternate timeline stuck around on its own merit, because people enjoyed it a lot, they enjoyed watching programming on it squished down while the listings of other TV channels scrolled on the bottom half of the screen. They enjoyed the Prevue Channel more than they enjoyed the channels it Prevued, and still do in their equivalent to our modern day. This is also a timeline where the leading cultural power tried to emulate everything possible from the Roman empire, including the lead poisoning.
In this timeline, the NFL actually signed a permanent deal to air multiple games per season on the Prevue Channel, this game included. I cannot remember if I meant for these to be from an alternative timeline in the current-day or from a time in the past. Frankly this is all a vehicle for the little video excerpts I made. Really you can ignore all the text in this, and I’m guessing that you are!
Fuse
Ah, Fuse, the channel which began as an American version of the Canadian channel MuchMusic, which turned into, like, an alternative MTV in the mid-2000s, precisely as I turned too old for children’s television, which meant that I spent roughly 100% of my time watching Fuse as an early teenager. That or VH1 Classic. In this timeline, the NFL was immediately usurped by the Alliance of American Football, like, strikingly fast, concerningly fast. Not only did the AAF make it to the end of the 2019 season, the NFL did not, the NFL folded midway through the 2019 season and the AAF took over on a full-year schedule promising football all the time.
Fuse absolutely leapt on the opportunity. They had to match the leading football league, the AAF, with the band whose videos they showed constantly – AAF. That’s right. Alien Ant Farm.
Unfortunately, the day of the broadcast, the members of the band Alien Ant Farm, who were supposed to do commentary for the game, were all caught with marijuana, which in this alternate timeline version of San Antonio, and only San Antonio, the rest of Texas is totally cool, means they spent a day in the stocks. Fuse Network had to resort to playing their music over the game footage. That is the reason why they did that. It’s not because I otherwise would’ve had to have done like, an impression of the Alien Ant Farm guys. They did that because the members of Alien Ant Farm got caught with marijuana in San Antonio, which is punished by a day in the stocks in that timeline. That’s what they told me. The Xplore4D people told me that.
Z Channel
Jerry Harvey’s Los Angeles-based cable channel was famous for showing classic, often esoteric films, in the original unedited format with letterboxing, a rarity at the time. There’s a great documentary about it and its programming manager, Jerry Harvey, that I saw and enjoyed. In one timeline, this station was accepted and accurately appreciated for what it was, and wasn’t shut down in 1989 after inexplicably pivoting to showing professional sporting events. No, in this timeline, it thrived for years, and when the NFL came to them with a proposal to broadcast a playoff game on the Z Channel, they jumped at the opportunity to put a Z Channel flair on the NFL playoffs.
After a series of negotiations, they ended up deciding that, rather than broadcasting a live game on Z Channel, they would show clips of a game from the 1940s, letterboxed, and they’d have Orson Welles monologue over it. In this timeline, this broadcast was deemed “the greatest broadcast of all time,” and it actually caused an irreversible melding of professional sports and highbrow film. The Criterion Collection sells Blu-Ray compilations of episodes of “NFL Network Top 10” in that universe. I have asked the Xplore4D people if I can move there but they have said it’s an impossibility at the moment.
Cinemax
In one timeline, the internet was never invented (good) but the world’s collective level of horniness increased at the same rate as it did in ours (bad, probably). Instead of an unending fire hose of constant streaming hardcore penetrative full-frontal DP POV JOI videos through everyone’s computer screens all the time, the nation had only one place to turn its hungry, horny eyes: The softcore offerings of Cinemax, on Cable.
Naturally, a nation plagued by constant, unquenchable, pent-up horniness, chose the XFL over the NFL and never looked back. It only made sense. The NFL didn’t even start their 2001 season, understanding that they’d been defeated by the XFL without even trying. The joint Cinemax/XFL broadcast was entitled “SkinemaX” (the capital X standing for the same thing as the “X” in XFL) and they went to work (as the rest of America also went to work).
The XFL/Cinemax partnership was considered “the strongest partnership in world history,” turning the two entities into the two most powerful media companies in the world, akin to Disney and Amazon in our timeline. Their combined powers were so great that the internet was actually stopped from coming into existence. Many people floated the idea but everyone agreed that Skinemax and the XFL was really the peak that society could reach, and the potential pitfalls of the internet coming into existence were too great. I have also asked the Xplore4D people if I could move to this but they, again, said it’s an impossibility at the moment, no matter how often and incessantly I begged.
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