A fan displays a sign in reference to Kansas City Chiefs' Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift before the Super Bowl in Las Vegas on Feb. 11.BRIAN SNYDER/Reuters
Throughout five-plus hours of preshow, someone who has nothing to do with football loomed over Super Bowl proceedings on Sunday. Every time you thought they were going to get back to talking about the game, this person reappeared.
I’m talking about the caveman from the Geico ads.
If extraterrestrials are monitoring our signals and have yet to decipher human language, they must think this guy runs the planet. That’s how often he was on TV on Sunday afternoon. At one point, the CBS panel interviewed him.
Taylor Swift was there, too, but spectrally.
Kansas City coach Andy Reid spoke admiringly of her oeuvre: “Yeah, you know, I have no idea about Taylor Swift. That’s not my genre.”
Donald Trump yelled at her on social media, but saved some love for her fashion muse: “I like her boyfriend, Travis, even though he may be a liberal, and probably can’t stand me.”
Boyfriend Travis showed up late to shoot down persistent rumours that everything about this “relationship” belongs in air quotes, hitting back at conspiracy theorists: “You’re crazy. You’re all crazy, man.”
He’s not wrong. You’re the one who’s spent nearly a full workday watching this schlock. Clearly, there is something off about you.
The Super Bowl itself isn’t special. It’s just another big game. What sets it apart is the preshow, which has no parallel.
It isn’t the amount of content, though that’s part of it. It is the tone. The du jour theme of western entertainment is slickness. Everything should be produced within an inch of its life.
The Super Bowl pregame is ripe, government cheese. It’s 100-per-cent saturated fats. This is as close as you will get to the centre of the guileless, self-congratulatory soul of America.
What does that look like?
It looks like Boomer, Phil and Coach Cowher sitting in a limo eating sandwiches as they are being rushed to the stadium in a Secret-Service-style convoy. Though this high-stakes journey was happening three hours before kickoff, it was treated with the seriousness of Lenin pulling in to the Finland Station.
It’s an entire segment on Carrot Top and his Las Vegas journey. Mr. Top made small news over the weekend when he told The New York Times that, despite his many contributions to American artistry, he had been unable to secure a ticket to the big game. What relief then when, postsegment, cameras panned to Mr. Top standing in a luxury box, alone, absolutely annihilating a footlong hot dog.
Ditto a similar feature about Wayne Newton, where the duke of schmaltz announced with real satisfaction: “I’ve had people die in my audience.”
It’s KC quarterback Patrick Mahomes meditating on the bench in an empty stadium for a very long time. A few minutes later, he went over to kneel at the goal posts and pray for an equally long time. So long that several nearby photographers got bored of taking pictures of him. Nobody this rich should need to pray this hard.
It is CBS doing a solid for its partners at Paramount by bringing on its European Champions League broadcast crew to play a game of ‘Whose soccer clichés are stupider?’ with their American counterparts.
The highlight of this clunker was one of the over-caffeinated Euros shouting, “I don’t know who [Pittsburgh Steeler] T.J. Watt is,” to T.J.’s brother, J.J. Watt.
It is a 10-minute, mini-feature film about Al Davis saving the NFL. Davis, an egomaniacal wing-nut who tried his best to run the Raiders franchise into the ground, did nothing of the sort. But truth doesn’t often make great TV.
Having the film cut to a shot of former Raiders CEO Amy Trask – the so-called ‘Princess of Darkness’ – weeping on the CBS sound stage was good stuff. It’s probably not the first time Davis made someone cry, even after leaving this veil of tears, but it may be the first time they’ve been motivated to do so by joy.
Waterworks featured heavily in the preshow. Players crying. Their moms and dads crying. Fans crying.
America can’t depend on the rest of the world to make it feel good about itself any more. That’s what happens when you stop doing your international chores.
Now the country has to provide its own emotional catharsis. The Super Bowl preshow was built for that purpose. James Brown and the guys on the panel put their hand up your shirt early, got hold of the area around your heart and would not stop massaging.
They did a good, if too long, Hangover bit that ended with pantless Phil and face-tattooed Boomer finding their lost pal, J.B. The four geriatric greats (plus Nate Burleson) huddled as Boomer said, “We’re the five best friends that anyone could have!”
It’s so corny you could turn it into alternative fuel, but it works on a country full of the lonely and disaffected.
The Super Bowl is pure glitz. It’s filled with people that have far more than you will ever have.
But the preshow is for everyone. Everyone’s special there. Especially anyone affiliated with Geico.
The final act of the preshow was rap star Post Malone, doing a country bit while squeezed into jeans, on America the Beautiful.
America is a machine that turns challenging people and ideas into palatable family entertainment. Tattooed like a gulag swell and about as threatening as an ad for erectile dysfunction, Malone is the poster boy of this process.
That’s not to say he was bad. He was great. What a great American voice on a great American song. The camera panned up in the stands to where Taylor Swift was standing, head on a friend’s shoulder, swaying to the music.
Despite all the problems that define the current American experience, all the doomsaying and disingenuous fear-mongering, for just a moment, everything was all right.