After 48 seasons, “Inside the NFL” is getting a brand new home — and is being rebooted dramatically into a completely different kind of show.
Since its launch on HBO in 1977, “Inside the NFLS” has been an hour-long commentary, analysis and highlights show focused on America’s top professional football league. But starting Sep. 8, it will return as an extremely short form web series streaming exclusively on Elon Musk’s social media platform X.
NFL Films has committed to producing at least 10 short episodes a week through Super Bowl 2026, which takes place on Feb. 8. It will continue to be produced by NFL Films. ESPN NFL analyst and former Pittsburgh Steelers safety Ryan Clark will host.
There will also be no uniform structure to the new version of the show, as Mitch Smith, head of original content for X, confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that “One episode could be one minute; another could be five minutes.” Smith says this will allow each episode “to adapt to the storylines of the season more quickly and organically based on what’s going on competitively throughout the season.”
How that works out in practice remains to be seen, but one change, according to THR, which first reported the news, is that segments from the original version of the show will be changed for the new, shorter version. These include segments called “Mic’d Up Moments,” “Big Game Edits,” and “Wire Watch.”
Keith Cossrow, head of content for NFL Films, said in a statement to THR, “this summer we partnered with X to present another longtime NFL Films franchise, ‘The Top 100,’ in a wholly new way and again saw strong results. At some point the light bulb went on for all of us here at Films: maybe it’s time to cut out the middle man, so to speak, and go directly to our audience which seems to be consuming this stuff mostly on social media anyway. As soon as we pitched the concept of posting daily shortform Inside the NFL ‘episodes’ to X, they lit up. So we all feel like it’s a perfect fit. Now we’ll see if we’re right.”
“Inside the NFL” debuted on HBO in 1977 and ran there until 2008, when it switched to Showtime. It remained on Showtime through 2021, at which point it moved over to Paramount+. In 2021 it was canceled on Paramount+ and moved to The CW.
