Last night I watched the entire Super Bowl from start to finish, the first time I’ve ever done that. My kids (two teens and a tween) are really into football right now, so there I was, sitting on the couch beside my kid, one more mom who's desperate to find a way to connect in spite of the ground constantly shifting beneath our relationship.
Since I certainly don’t have any insights about the actual game play, here instead are my thoughts on the non-football parts.
First, let’s get the worst moment out of the way: Travis Kelce getting screamy, aggressive, and borderline violent with his coach. I was mostly neutral on him before, but this was such bad form. Imagine if you did that to your boss at work, shouting at the side of their face and shoving into them. You’d be fired on the spot. I guess we have different workplace standards for an intense game of football, but should we? Surgeons, airline pilots, and school teachers have intense jobs (with potentially dire, real-life consequences, I might add), and we wouldn't accept them behaving that way.
This boils down to a big ol' man tantrum. I didn't get what I want, so I'm going to get ugly about it. Not a good look, Trav.
So profesh.
Shortly before the game, one of my boys commented that despite football having a reputation as a sport that men watch, he's seen lots of women at the high school and college games he has attended. We wondered what the male/female ratio is at pro football games. Then in the first ad break, here comes a drug to treat perimenopause symptoms. Then the second ad break had Dove soap talking about body confidence and how it affects girls in sports. That doesn’t answer my question of how many women are attending the games, but there must be plenty of GenX and Millenial women in the TV audience to justify those ad buys.
The commercials for online gambling seemed in particularly poor taste, with their little 800 number in small print at the bottom, ready to help you out as soon as you lose your money, job, family, whatever, to your gambling addiction. Not unexpected, of course, since the Super Bowl was in Las Vegas, and the NFL is fully in bed with the online betting industry. But still disappointing. The slate of celebs pushing it felt like the new version of all those shills for crypto a couple years ago.
Here's my internal monologue during some of the other commercials:
Wicked: Where’s the guy who left his wife for Ariana Grande?...I kinda want to have an Oz movie marathon, but in which order? Original first, then the prequel, or vice versa?
Feet washing: Huh, a commercial for Jesus...Where have I seen a picture like that before? Oh yeah...
(I will always take an opportunity to reference Fred Rogers doing the quiet work of discipleship. "I don't have a towel." "It's ok; you can share mine." Low key radicalism in 1969.)
Lindor truffles: Good reminder; I will grab a bag when I’m at the pharmacy filling my prescription for that perimenopause drug and buying Dove soap.
Jeff Goldblum: Always a delight to see him. What's he promoting again? Eh, whatever, just keep being weirdly appealing.
Dunkin' Donuts: I do appreciate when a celebrity can make fun of himself, so you win, Ben Affleck. A fun and goofy contrast to your put-upon, grouchy persona.
Beyonce: She and Tony Hale make a good buddy comedy! She looks amazing in every iteration. This is a beautiful commercial.
My son and I had a good chuckle at the Kawasaki ad. Eagle gets a mullet! Turtle gets a mullet! Bear gets a mullet! Doggie gets a mullet! Everyone gets a mullet! (I reserve the right to enjoy this commercial while reiterating my strongly held objection to the current mullet revival among the young people.)
The list of tech services advertised makes an interesting time capsule for 2024.
-Crowdstrike, to fight security breaches
-Guided Frame Google AI, to help partially sighted people use their phones
-Homes, a Zillow competitor. Yay! more ways to browse houses far beyond your price range
-Copilot, "your everyday AI companion" to help you finish college, create a movie, start a business, become a nurse, I guess...etc.
-Temu, at least three times, encouraging me to "shop like a billionaire". As far as I can tell, the business idea behind Temu is "what if we sold the same cheap crap as Amazon/Wish/Alibaba, and threw in more data mining plus multi-level marketing?"
-And the most cynical award goes to Snapchat, which positioned itself as distinct from and better than that pesky "social media" that encourages kids to chase likes and engagement and shallow connections. Oh yes, Snapchat, with its disappearing posts and snap streaks and suggesting randos who happen to be near you is definitely very different from all that. LOL forever.
Ok, enough about the commercials. Moving on to the halftime show. As with Travis Kelce, I was pretty neutral on Usher going into this, but he was so good! I loved the acrobats and other circus performers at the beginning, plus his gorgeous white cape and suit, like a very fancy ringmaster. He gave a shout out to his mama, a marching band came in, and Alicia Keys popped up for a minute, decked out in red sequins, a red cape, and a red swoosh of a piano. Gorgeous.
During the sexy slow jam portion of the show, there were plenty of hip swirls, and a two layer undressing: first the easy snap-off shirt and then the peeling off of the tank top. Then more special guests that were impressive, but honestly my favorite part was when the roller skate crew came in, dancing and doing flips(!), and I thought, what in the Surya Bonaly is going on here? And then Usher himself rolled out, singing, dancing, and skating all at once! That's a triple threat I didn't know I needed to see until I saw it. Do we think he already was a roller skate enthusiast or did he learn it for this show?
(Scratch that. I just googled it, and apparently he has been an avid skater all his life, is coming out with a skating-inspired fashion line similar to the black and blue costumes worn here, and is passionate about spreading rinks far and wide. Usher contains multitudes.)
The grand finale was, naturally, Yeah, and by the end the stage was packed with dancers and bumping so much I was crossing my fingers that they had double checked the structural integrity of it before the show. Those notes from Yeah (boop-beep, boop-beep) have been in my head all day.
So anyway, the Chiefs won. Apparently Mahomes is a very, very good quarterback.
The end.
Bonus link: my favorite Super Bowl ad from 1999.
"When I grow up, I want to file all day."
"I wanna claw my way up to middle management."
When this originally aired in 1999, I was just about to finish college, and I didn't even know yet that my first job would involve a mind-numbing amount of filing.
