Nickelodeon Is Getting Its Own Super Bowl LVIII Telecast

What happens in Vegas is slime hitting the big time

Nickelodeon, you just won the New Fun Cast Championship, you're going to the Super Bowl! After several successful NFL broadcasts on Nickelodeon powered by CBS, the networks have been confirmed to be producing a kid-focused alternate telecast of Super Bowl LVIII for the former, the first alternate telecast of the league's championship game, the biggest event of the year.

Super Bowl LVIII is happening on Sunday, February 11, 2024, from Las Vegas, Nevada and this alternate telecast promises a "family-centric, surprise-filled special presentation", with eye-popping on-field graphics, guest reporters, virtual filters and more, just as previous broadcasts have. Additional details on the Nickelodeon Super Bowl telecast, such as programming, production and announcers, will be revealed at a later date. This was frankly inevitable. When ViacomCBS was formed from remerger in December 2019, the company announced that one of the ways it would capitalize on it would be corporate synergy between CBS's NFL coverage and Nickelodeon, to try to make football fun for kids, it very much seemed. Nickelodeon was given a 2021 NFC Wild Card Game, which would end up featuring the New Orleans Saints and Chicago Bears.

The broadcast team consisted of Noah Eagle, former wide receiver Nate Burleson (also from CBS), then-All That star Gabrielle Nevaeh Green, and her co-star Lex Lumpkin as the sideline reporter. The presentation was so well received by audiences that Nickelodeon got another Wild Card game the next postseason, with the same broadcast team and Burleson's NFL Slimetime cohost, Dylan Gilmer, aka Young Dylan and star of his own Nick show, as sideline reporter. In their respective years, halftime previews of Kamp Koral and Big Nate aired. Last season, instead of a Super Wild Card game, Nickelodeon's alternate telecast game was a regular season Christmas, or Nickmas, Day game between the Denver Broncos and the Los Angeles Rams. Live commentary from a motion-capture Patrick Star voiced as always by Bill Fagerbakke himself brought some proper burns to Russell Wilson's gameplay. That 2021 postseason was CBS's most recent turn at the Super Bowl, and obviously bringing such to the big event just weeks after trying it for the first time wasn't really doable.

"We are excited to expand this extremely successful partnership between CBS Sports, Nickelodeon and the NFL for television's biggest stage at Super Bowl LVIII," said Sean McManus, Chairman of CBS Sports. "There is nobody more suited than our CBS Sports production team, in conjunction with our friends at Nickelodeon, to deliver an innovative and slime-filled Nick-ified telecast for kids and family, alongside our industry-leading NFL production on CBS, to create a truly unique viewing experience and broaden the reach of the Super Bowl to a new legion of fans."

The Nickelodeon telecast will also be available to viewers in the United Kingdom, Australia and New Zealand on tape delay. Paramount+ will of course be live streaming the main CBS telecast. 20 years earlier, before CBS Corporation broke up with Viacom, Nickelodeon had a Nick Takes Over the Super Bowl special hosted by the U-Pick Live folks and featuring many of the network’s stars, including SpongeBob and cast members from All That and Drake & Josh. In the intervening years, the character of Pick Boy (Jeff Sutphen) was actually used as the network’s liaison for Super Bowl media days, keeping the character alive far longer than the show it originated from.

Source: CBS Sports