A lot of the television films made in the 1970's with sizeable all-star casts, with a handful of exceptions, are fairly cheesy by today's standards (and almost certainly were in their own time as well). The 1978 entry SUPERDOME is a case in point.
With a fairly robust line-up of all-stars, both actors and athletes-as-actors, SUPERDOME involves the intrigues behind the lead-up to the Super Bowl, being played at the Superdome in New Orleans (as it indeed was around the time this film aired on January 9, 1978 [Super Bowl XII). The intrigues involve a player (Ken Howard) who is less occupied with his bum knee and his worries about how he will hold up in the Big Game than he is with his wife (Susan Howard); a quarterback (Tom Selleck) who is being courted by a management firm; and a few other minor things. But when a couple of employees of one of the teams turn up dead in somewhat violent ways, that team's manager (David Janssen, one of the most underrated actors in history) has to find out who the assailant is before the Big Game starts. As he remarks to someone: "We've got seventy five thousand people in The Dome, and a psycho on the loose". It turns out that the assailant's bosses don't want Janssen's team to win, and it's up to him to find out who it is.
As cheesy as SUPERDOME looks, and as so obvious as it is a made-for-TV clone of two previous big-screen films, TWO-MINUTE WARNING and BLACK SUNDAY, which mix the violence of football with actual violence, it is, if no better than most TV fare of its kind, at least not any worse. In large part, it is because, even if he felt the part he played was kind of beneath the abilities of someone who has portrayed Dr. Richard Kimble in "The Fugitive" ion TV in the 1960's, Janssen does exude a goodly amount of credibility and professionalism in that part. The cast includes a lot of luminaries, including Edie Adams, Ed Nelson, Van Johnson, Donna Mills, and Jane Wyatt, and cameo roles by NFL legends Bubba Smith and Dick Butkus, plus the fact that it was filmed entirely on location in New Orleans and even inside the Superdome itself.
Jerry Jameson, who directed SUPERDOME, is no stranger to this all-star "multi-jeopardy" format, having helmed similar made-for-TV films like 1974's HURRICANE, TERROR ON THE 40TH FLOOR, and HEAT WAVE, among others, as well as the very good 1975 TV film THE DEADLY TOWER (about Charles Whitman's infamous 1966 sniper spree in Texas), and the 1977 big-screen disaster film AIRPORT '77, does a competent job here. He doesn't get too terribly bogged down in the melodramatics, though one can understandably be disappointed by the idea that the film itself ends right as the Super Bowl itself is about to start.
I'll be willing to give this a '6' rating for effort, being aware that it had the potential to be as scary as the films it attempts to be a clone of.
