I'm Jody Rosen and I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times magazine.

Every week, tens of millions of people in the United States watch football, including me.

I watch football at home with my kid. I watch it alone.

it under the covers at night on my cell phone.

It's just an incredibly entertaining way to lose yourself for three hours.

And I've always been interested in way to lose yourself for three hours.

And I've always been interested in the fact that football is so popular with such a broad

swath of Americans.

It's not just white guys in their man cave, but every kind of person on the demographic spectrum.

But I was also interested in the artifice of televised football.

The idea that a TV broadcast isn't just a kind of unmediated document of a game

unfolding in real time, but in many ways a crafted televisual entertainment product.

In big picture terms it means who wins and who loses of course,

but it's also all the little details that make up that larger story.

It's the dramatous personae, the... details that make up that larger story.

It's the Dramatous Personae, the coaches on either sideline,

the owners of the teams who are in the luxury suites,

all the different star players.

Once I began to focus as a viewer on the technical aspects of the

storytelling, I grew curious about the vast labor force that's behind the spectacle of televised football.

So this week's Sunday Reed is my recent feature for the magazine about Prime Time Television's

number one show for over a decade,

...