I flipped on the Nickelodeon broadcast in the same spirit that many people drink before a wedding or swallow bags of fungi before a boring summer concert; playoff Mitch Trubisky did not feel interesting enough to me, a sober person, and I needed to see him covered in slime to get me through the next few hours. That is, if Trubisky was even going to make it into the Slime Zone.
There’s a lot we could say about Viacom’s experimental NFL broadcast for kids, which debuted in the 4:40 p.m. ET hour on Sunday amid wild-card weekend and converted the typical football viewing experience into a children’s aesthetic with simpler graphics, a casual broadcast crew explaining the game’s complexities and, yes, digital slime pouring into the end zone when a team crossed the goal line (I think it’s brilliant, strategically, for parents who don’t want to surrender control of their remote on a particularly exciting Sunday to a mob of unruly, Caillou-starved children).