In Focus delivers deeper coverage of the political, cultural, and ideological issues shaping America. Published daily by senior writers and experts, these in-depth pieces go beyond the headlines to give readers the full picture. You can find our full list of In Focus pieces here.
Despite early headlines declaring that Sunday’s Super Bowl featured the most-watched halftime show in the game’s history, Nielsen found that Bad Bunny’s performance averaged 128.2 million viewers, rendering it the fourth-highest viewed show ever. That’s less a consequence of how the Puerto Rican reggaeton star actually did during his show, and more a product of the fact that the Super Bowl more generally, like every other pop culture juggernaut that used to unite the country on the couch, may finally risk trending the Oscars, the Grammys, and countless other once-lauded programs now relegated to the dustbin of cultural relevance.
Sunday’s game averaged 124.9 million viewers across NBC and its numerous streaming services, down from the 2025 average of 127.7 million. But Nielsen changed its methodology to its “Big Data + Panel” rating system at the start of the NFL season, with the Sports Business Journal estimating that the new Nielsen rating system rounds up viewership estimates by 5% to 8% relative to prior metrics. Yes, Bad Bunny drew about 5 million fewer viewers than Kendrick Lamar did the year prior, but that’s in large part because the game itself drew 3 million fewer viewers than before.
MELANIA TRUMP UNDERSTANDS THE ASSIGNMENT
It’s possible these numbers are a fluke, attributable to one of the most objectively boring big games in recent memory. It’s also possible that a nontrivial portion of the country agreed with President Donald Trump‘s declaration that Bad Bunny’s Spanish-language set was “an affront to the Greatness of America” and a “slap in the face” to “our standards of Success.” After all, Turning Point USA’s alternative “All-American Halftime Show” starring Kid Rock garnered over 6 million live viewers on YouTube and, according to the conservative nonprofit group’s estimates, at least three times as many combined viewers across streaming platforms.
But for all of Bad Bunny’s past posturing about left-wing politics, his halftime show was conspicuously devoid of any mentions of Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or immigration more broadly. Rather, outside of the singer’s closing argument that “God bless America” means all the Americas — arguably an implicit endorsement of the White House’s recommitment to the Monroe Doctrine — the halftime show was almost actively apolitical, if you could only ignore the fact that the entire set was in Spanish and without subtitles. (In a far cry from the recent wokery of the past, Bad Bunny’s backup dancers were almost exclusively conventionally attractive women, and he conducted an honest-to-God, heterosexual marriage on live television.)
I suspect that the dyspepsia over Bad Bunny’s performance is less about the singer’s personal politics or even his actual show, but rather that he is a product of the post-monocultural era. Bad Bunny is both the single most-streamed musician on planet Earth and a bit of an enigma to the average NFL fan. And indeed, if you are the median NFL viewer, a middle-aged white man who lives in the suburbs, you may never see a halftime star you’re already familiar with again.
In part, this is pure capitalism. The NFL clearly believes it’s hit peak market saturation among Americans older than 30 and must branch out to younger and global audiences to sustain the growth required to justify the astronomical costs of the business. The selection of Bad Bunny was an obvious ploy to appeal to Gen Z, which hasn’t tuned into pro football at the rates of previous generations, and Latino audiences internationally. Already, the league’s largest audiences outside of the United States are in Mexico and Brazil, and starting next year, the NFL will hold annual games in Mexico City. As a matter of a basic business calculation, it’s possible the Bad Bunny gambit paid off: The NFL is clearly banking on the fact that NFL die-hards won’t abandon the game over a halftime show they don’t love, and while U.S. ratings fell short of record highs, social media consumption of the show was more than double that of Lamar’s 2025 revue.
But even if the NFL weren’t trying to go global, it’s hard to imagine which musical guest would attract mass audiences if only because streaming and social media have transformed American culture from a virtual monolith to a choose-your-own-adventure of genres for the generations.
For most of the last century, the entire country watched television shows on one of a handful of networks and movies produced by fewer than a dozen studios. Even when cable created a niche tier of options for the higher-income viewer, Americans still shared some cultural events at the exact same time. After nearly half the country watched the 1996 Super Bowl, 53 million Americans — a fifth of the nation’s entire population — watched the special Friends lead-out episode, aptly named “The One After the Superbowl.”
Without Googling, test yourself: Can you even name what this year’s lead-out program was after this Super Bowl? While we don’t yet have that data for the 2026 lead-out show, we do know that the 2025 lead-out, a game show called The Floor, got 14 million viewers, or a quarter as many viewers as Friends did when the population was almost 100 million people smaller than it is today.
A fifth of the nation watched the Oscars in 1996, when Titanic took the award show by storm. Today, just 1 in 16 Americans watches the Oscars. In 2012, when the population had 30 million fewer people than it does today, nearly 40 million Americans watched the Grammys. This year, viewership fell below 15 million. Even the State of the Union is only undergoing a temporary reboot in relevance thanks to the Trump bump. Whereas Bill Clinton and George W. Bush would routinely bring in over 50 million or even 60 million viewers in a smaller country, Joe Biden couldn’t break 30 million viewers for half of his presidency.
If you were already a loyal football fan — by definition, an American at least older than 40 — the Super Bowl halftime show is specifically no longer for you, per the corporate strategy of the NFL. But even if the NFL decided to stand firm on its brand as the national football league, it would have to bring in younger viewers, and the fact is that younger Americans no longer share a culture.
My husband was born in 1985, a full decade and a half before me, but we share almost the exact same cultural language because, prior to the past 10 years or so, Americans broadly watched the same TV, went to similar movies, and listened to a lot of the same music. He can quote a corny sitcom or Judd Apatow comedy without context, and I, like 90% of other younger millennials, will immediately get the joke. The same just isn’t true with anyone a decade younger than me. Whereas I used to catch up with boomer coworkers every Monday morning after the original run of Game of Thrones when I was in college, not one Zoomer intern I’ve worked with has ever done the same with me for the spinoff.
Music is arguably even more atomizing. While everyone over a certain age could not get away with failing to listen to Britney Spears or U2 or Beyonce or Coldplay on the radio or at parties, Gen Z has largely logged out of IRL social life and finds their music solely on individual headphones. They can ingratiate themselves in reggaeton or K-pop or any other genre that has global reach but limited ubiquity among their actual, physical neighbors. I’m hoping that Gen Z at least gets to bond with their friends over the trends they discover online, but if they don’t, they have a whole world of strangers to connect with over their sub-sub-cultures on TikTok, Reddit, and whatever else the kids use these days.
Here’s a closing thought experiment: pretend you are an NFL executive trying to choose a star for the 2027 halftime show, and while you want to shore up American audiences, you have to choose a musician younger than 40. Who do you pick? What musician can you think of who is broadly popular enough not to necessitate an alternative halftime show?
DOORDASH DOOMERISM MISSES THE POINT
In this thought experiment, the only musician who I could personally think of who immediately counts as ubiquitous as Katy Perry and No Doubt were when they performed (and both headliners were indeed younger than 40 at the time) is Taylor Swift. Who are the other musicians who count as the industry’s version of a movie star? A bona fide household name who is capable of pleasing one of the last, truly diverse and universal crowds in the country?
I didn’t love or hate Bad Bunny’s show, but that didn’t matter because it wasn’t for me. But in a post-monocultural country, the NFL will only have a harder and harder time making a general audience happy, because a general, unified audience no longer really exists.