The Apple Music Super Bowl LX Halftime Show Starring Bad Bunny picked up seven Emmys at this week’s Creative Arts ceremony, according to Variety, winning music direction, choreography, sound mixing, lighting design, technical direction and camera work, and directing. Jay-Z, one of the show’s executive producers, now has three Emmys to his name.
Bad Bunny is a legitimate global pop star, one whose halftime show pulled in 128.2 million viewers domestically and roughly 4.2 billion worldwide, and none of that stopped a wide swath of the country from deciding his selection was somehow a problem, largely because he’s Puerto Rican and performed primarily in Spanish.
A lot of that outrage came from those who found in Bad Bunny a convenient hill to plant a flag on, but that Venn diagram is also a perfect circle with the same crowd that treats every cultural flashpoint as a chance to farm clout or run a grift. The backlash eventually led Turning Point USA to stage a rival halftime show that same night, stacking Kid Rock alongside a lineup of country acts.
That broadcast, marketed as the wholesome alternative, didn’t win a single Emmy.
Once the dust settled, plenty of critics actually praised Bad Bunny’s set for its themes of unity and inclusion, delivered at a moment when those ideas don’t get much airtime in American politics. Critics picked at what they could, but most of their complaints were either based on things that weren’t true or were just good, old-fashioned xenophobia.
There was a receptacle for some of those complaints: The Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which takes public complaints about broadcasts like the Super Bowl, and TMZ later obtained more than 2,000 filed after this particular show, with over 100 targeting Bad Bunny specifically as inappropriate for network TV. Reading through them, it’s genuinely hard to tell which ones are sincere and which are trolling. A chunk claimed the songs themselves were vulgar, even though Bad Bunny stuck to radio edits of tracks like “Safaera” and “Tití Me Preguntó.” Others swore he used slurs against white people, that the choreography was too sexual, that the whole thing was political theater, or, in a real head-scratcher, that performing in Spanish was inherently “un-American” and disrespectful to veterans.
For what it’s worth, the FCC investigated Bad Bunny’s halftime show following complaints from Republican politicians and found… nothing.
The Television Academy, evidently, found plenty. Seven Emmys’ worth.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.