In the US, a sitcom, or situation comedy, refers to a genre of short-form scripted television in which recurring characters encounter low-stakes “situations”: someone re-enacting “Silence of the Lambs” during CPR training after a co-worker’s heart-attack; a friend fumbling a Junior Mint into a patient’s chest cavity while watching a surgery. The events of a sitcom are extraordinary enough to count as “situations,” but never threaten the guarantee that characters will return safely to an episodic flow of living. The genre insulates from what Lauren Berlant describes as situation tragedy, where “the situation threatens utter, abject unraveling,” a “potentially significant threat to the ordinary’s ongoing atmosphere” [1]. Always returning to tepid homeostasis, sitcoms blunt jagged temporal edges of “real” medical situations (like a heart-attack or surgical infection). The genre cycles medical ruptures into reassurances of safety: safe for the characters and safe for viewers to continue nurturing attachments to them.
I’m interested in how televised NFL games might similarly recast medical ruptures into “situations” of anticipated resolution and harmless continuation; how they keep the game on the move and viewer attachments to it nourished. They align with sitcoms not because there’s humor, but in the Shakespearean sense that things end up okay and life continues on. Injuries—especially concussions—threaten to turn broadcasts into tragedy: a harsh stop, the finality of a player leaving the game, and, perhaps, a viewer’s full-blooded acknowledgement of ethical crisis. Embroiled in popular critiques of the NFL’s hyperviolence, militarism, and racialized exploitation, highly publicized findings on Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) hover over each concussion protocol; a repeated physical and ethical threat.
What would it mean to think of this ethical crisis as a crisis of genre, and of NFL broadcasts as an aesthetic object committed to managing genre (more, it seems, than managing its safety)? How might the temporalities of situational comedy and tragedy help us better understand how NFL broadcasts use aesthetic tools to remain sites of ongoing attachment despite their obvious harm? While many factors contribute to fans’ continued attachment—including, for some, objectifying players as disposable entertainment, glamorizing toughness within a masculinist nationalism, and more banal forms of complicity—I’m interested in also looking at the aesthetic gestures that keep the game and its viewership moving forward despite medical threat. I think here specifically with the sideline medical tent—the “blue tent”—as one such gesture. The pop-up tent doesn’t just downplay the seriousness of injury, it becomes a technology of genre, marking medical ruptures as benign and episodic “situations” with inevitably harmless resolutions.
Referred to as the “blue tent” in broadcasts, unmarked collapsible medical tents became a requirement in every NFL stadium in 2017. Their implementation and continued emphasis during broadcasts are direct responses to public demands for reckoning: waves of media output educated viewers on ethical issues like CTE and “race-norming,” the league’s former practice of adjusting neuropsychological standards based on a player’s race when calculating payouts in concussion settlements [2]. The ethical crisis has never been more widely publicized, and the blue tent attempts to manage it by braiding medical authority into the aesthetic production of cyclical safety.
In repeatedly materializing new but temporary space on the sideline, the blue tent creates a medical “situation” that acknowledges and then manages the threat of slipping into tragedy. The game is already compartmentalized into events: four episodic snaps that reset and repeat. The tent signals an injury isn’t grave enough to require the player be carted under the stadium or transported to the hospital, but assures viewers that players are being cared for—they’ll pop out soon. NFL reps say blue tents (which have no team logos) offer privacy and focused attention; encasement for an objective medical gaze [3]. Only medical staff are allowed because coaches and other players may sway diagnosis—an admission that attachments to the game would overwhelm understanding or care for physical wellness [4].
Going up and down, the tent anticipates an injury’s resolution and renders concussion checks into an episodic ordinary like the sitcom: extraordinary enough to mark a discrete situation, ordinary enough to cycle back into a series of harmless plays. Structurally, they often provide a segue into a commercial break—we’ll be back after this.
It’s in this anticipated resolution that I read the blue tent as an attachment mechanism similar to cruel optimism. Berlant defines cruel optimism as “a relation…when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing” [5]. If what brings viewers to the sport are an array of attachments including identity, sociality, or a fantasy of the “good life” in the US entailing worry-free entertainment, then continuing to promote players’ endangerment threatens the underlying values of those attachments: community, “goodness,” harmless fun. We know it’s harmful for the players—and players must remain the central concern—it also threatens ethical injury for viewers.
As tools of genre, blue tents treat viewers’ injuries as much as if not more than players’. Conflating a stripped-down aesthetics of objective medical authority with the casualness of collapsible tarp, they perform ethical relief and motor toward resolution, continued ordinariness, and anticipated attachment. What if we thought of this not exclusively as viewers believing the NFL’s performance of care (and being duped by its production of medical authority), but as viewers participating in the aspiration/expectation of genre? What does genre allow us to understand—and change—that gets otherwise dismissed under viewer gullibility or cruelty? Does it just transfer belief in the NFL into belief (/relief) in the aesthetic object?
American football is, among many things, an aesthetic object. It’s threaded with hope, an anticipatory line pulling viewers, players, and participants to the next play. There’s a meaningful earnestness in its commitment to an ultimately meaningless game, one that savors alignment, connection, and impossibility. NFL broadcasts instrumentalize this aesthetic meaningfulness, contributing genre and shifting viewer attachment from an ethically fraught league to an aesthetic ideal in the hopes, it seems, of excusing or hiding harm.
In sitcom temporality, NFL broadcasts fictionalize their athletes, lowering the stakes of harm because players and their physiological wellbeing warp into something less “real.” And perhaps it’s aestheticization that makes attachment to that harm continuous, cruel, optimistic, and very real.
Notes
[1] Berlant, Lauren, Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2011), 6, my emphasis.
[2] Associated Press, “NFL Pledges to Stop ‘Race-Norming,’ Review Past Scores for Potential Race Bias,” NFL.com, June 2, 2021, https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-pledges-to-stop-race-norming-review-past-scores-for-potential-race-bias.
[3] The Canadian Press, “A Peek Inside the Blue Medical Tent That Has Become a Fixture on NFL Sidelines,” TSN, October 21, 2025, https://www.tsn.ca/nfl/article/a-peek-inside-the-blue-medical-tent-that-has-become-a-fixture-on-nfl-sidelines/.
[4] According to “A Peek Inside,” the player’s helmet is often “hidden” outside the tent to deter them from trying to rush the diagnostic procedure and return to play. Players, coaches, and staff occasionally also set up the blue tent to pee, but broadcasters don’t make note of that.
[5] Berlant, Cruel Optimism, 1.
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