In previous years, after the Super Bowl, I’ve listed my favorite ads of the night.  I’m not going to do that this year because, quite frankly, I don’t have enough ads to list.  This year, the Super Bowl was boring.  The game was boring and the ads were boring.  There were barely any new movie trailers.  In previous years, Leonard and I exhausted ourselves trying to keep up with and share all of the Super Bowl movie spots.  This year, we could take things easy.

As for the game …. listen, I’m not a football person.  Our longtime readers know that.  Usually, when I’m bored with a football game, I assume it’s because I’m just not into football.  But this year, the game was so slow that even my colleagues here at TSL got bored with it.  While the biggest game of the year was being played in New Orleans, we largely used the game as background noise as we talked about everything from HBO’s True Detective to whether or not it was acceptable to nuke all of your enemies in Civ.  Once I realized that there weren’t going to be any big commercials, I immediately started thinking about relaxing in a hot tub for an hour or two.  It turned out to be a little less than an hour because it’s cold outside, folks!

What a disappointing game.  I can’t believe that I actually pre-empted my retro television reviews for that thing.  Oh well!  Live and learn.

Actually, now that I think about it, there was one commercial that I really liked, just because it featured a horse.

I’ve seen some speculation online that the commercials were safe and predictable this year because ad agencies are still adjusting to how to advertise in the second Trump era.  That’s possible.  It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Super Bowl commercials that were so determinedly nonpartisan.  In the past, I think the general assumption that advertisers made was that the country was full of politically active young people with a lot of spending money and, as a result, it only made sense to tailor commercials to them.  Hence, we got Zachary Quinto dramatically reading the ending of 1984 for Amazon Audible and Kylie Jenner defusing tensions at a protest by giving a Pepsi to a cop.  We got a commercial for a migraine medicine in which the main character was able to go to a protest because her migraine cleared up.  There was even a commercial featuring a teenage girl leading an environmental rally because she had the confidence that went along with having clear skin.  All the online complaining was taken as a badge of honor.  “We’re making the right people mad,” as the saying goes.  But, with the recent elections, it’s now kind of obvious that the supposedly leftward tilt of the country was much overestimated.  It felt like the ads this year were trying to reclaim the middle, nonpartisan ground that was originally abandoned in 2017.  They did so by playing everything safe.  As a result, none of the commercials this year were controversial but, at the same time, none of them were particularly interesting either.  It says something about how bland things were that the most talked about commercial was another one of those flaky “He Gets Us” commercials, which feel like almost a parody of the shallow understanding most people have of theology.

(Incidentally, we watched the game on Tubi.  Tubi did a very good job of streaming the game, with none of the trouble that Netflix has had with its live events.)

In other words, the Super Bowl was boring this year but I did enjoy watching it with my TSL colleagues.  And I love horses!  And now, on with the rest of 2025!