Jordan Levin

The NFL’s content chief talks Lady Gaga’s Super Bowl halftime show, TV ratings woes and why the Viacom decline is ‘criminal’

- Marisa Guthrie

An up-and-down NFL season culminates Feb. 5 with Fox’s coverage of Super Bowl LI. The game is the largest U.S. television event, surpassing 100 million viewers every year since 2010. But this time, one of the last truly communal viewing experiences in a fragmented media landscape comes as the country is divided about the presidency of Donald Trump. Jordan Levin, the NFL’s chief content officer who oversees the half time show, says he isn’t worried that headliner Lady Gaga, who campaigned for Hillary Clinton and protested at Trump Tower on election night, will create a Super Bowl controversy. “True artists understand that they have the power to not only make a lasting impression on their legacy but also to do something as inclusive as possible,” he says.

Based at NFL Network’s offices in Culver City, Levin, 49, grew up in Chicago and Houston; he remains a Bears fan, though he’s now a Los Angeles Rams season ticket holder. His career has been defined by an entrepreneurial bent. He ran The WB network during its ’90s heyday of Dawson’s Creek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and operated digital-content studio Generate. In 2014, he was given the reins at Xbox Studios, but Microsoft shuttered the studio a mere 10 months later.

A married father of two daughters, ages 21 and 14, and an 18-year-old son, Levin joined the league in a newly created role in June 2015 with a mandate to build out the NFL’s content offerings. His vast portfolio includes the league’s digital properties, NFL Films, cable’s NFL Network (which has 400 employees and is in 72 million homes) and such event franchises as the Super Bowl half time show and NFL Honors. THR caught up with Levin at NFL headquarters in New York, where he discussed the election-sapped season, the future of Thursday Night Football and whom he’d like to poach from another network.