I suppose Tubi is to be thanked for streaming the Super Bowl for free for us cable-cutters. I didn’t even have to fork over my email address. Then again, I had been looking forward to a convenient excuse for skipping the oddly dispiriting bombast entirely.
The reward was a lopsided game, as the Super Bowl reverted to dull tradition after a string of thrillers. But that wasn’t really a problem, because most football fans no doubt took considerable satisfaction from seeing the fortune-favored, two-time defending champion Chiefs so thoroughly dismantled by the man-mountains of the Eagles’ defensive line.
No, the problem, as I hesitantly joined the nation’s advertising watch party, was how thuddingly unfunny those ads were. The most coveted and expensive 30-to-60-second slots in television history and this is what they come up with? Too clever by half is too kind a judgment.
Matt Damon as David Beckham’s long-lost brother to painfully hawk Stella Artois, as if any self-respecting Brit would countenance that watery excuse of a brew. Glen Powell in an unamusing blond wig starring in a ham-fisted action slash fairy tale glorifying Dodge Ram pickup trucks yet willfully eschewing any attempt to get across the mechanical attributes. An old Meg Ryan and an older Billy Crystal reprising the embarrassing fake-orgasm scene in Katz’s Delicatessen from the 1989 “When Harry Met Sally,” complete with the telegraphed groaner of a punchline, yes, the interested onlooker will have what she’s having — even as played by this year’s favorite Hollywood hottie, Sydney Sweeney.
I’d normally stop there, as there were simply too many, and I had to look away. One of those subtly taking issue with the current political moment was notable, however, as the N.F.L. touted its work with youth programs, highlighting newly scapegoated groups: the developmentally challenged, the physically disabled, kids of color. “I am somebody,” was the ad’s mantra, from a poem by a different Southern pastor but unmistakably recalling Jesse Jackson, who once made serious noise in a Democratic primary.
So why didn’t he become president? He’s charismatic and telegenic, like the current White House occupant. With equally interesting hair. Both born in the 1940s. Actually 6-foot-3 — that is, without two-inch lifts in his heels. Impressive in comportment, without the girdle. Appealingly dusky of complexion, without the fake-and-bake spray-on tan.
My fellow Americans, go figure.