• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, February 6, 2017

By the time 2017 is over, Super Bowl 51 could emerge as the year’s most exhausting TV show (pending the outcome of the Oscars February 26).

Not that it wasn’t worth sticking it out until the very end for that fairy tale ending, but along the way, every non-football portion of this telecast was so epic and over-the-top that it was possible at times to be overcome with fatigue.

All of those commercials aiming to condense the saga of America into 60 seconds, along with the Lady Gaga sound-and-light show and all the other ancillary interstitial touches that went into this almost five-hour television marathon are almost too much to take in at one sitting.

No wonder people throw Super Bowl parties. It’s much easier to digest this annual rite of February if you’re in a group distracted by other people and bowls of party snacks. When you watch the Super Bowl alone at home, you end up absorbing the full brunt of it.

This year, I did something different than in past years. With an eye on this customary morning-after column about the big show, I didn’t take any notes. Usually, I pay studious attention to the commercials, making a note or two on every single one right after they appear.

I didn’t do that this year, however, in an effort to better approximate the way other people -- all those millions who are not TV columnists -- take in this spectacle. Specifically, I wished to learn if it is possible to remember all, or any, of the splashy advertising on the day after without the assistance of notes scrawled on a yellow legal pad.

The answer is: Not particularly. For one thing, if you don’t pay judicious attention to the commercials during the various breaks, it is certainly possible to miss some of them entirely.

And if you do pay attention, you can find yourself on the day after having difficulty distinguishing one commercial from another. Which car company was that again? Alfa Romeo? 

There was another spot -- a comedic one -- early in the game that showed the members of a secret society having a conversation on the subject of secrecy. On Monday morning, I had to look it up. Oh, it was the avocado commercial.

There was a spot in which little children were dressed up as past Super Bowl stars. No columnist wishes to come out against cute children, so I will give this spot its due: The needle on the Cute-o-meter went slightly past 10 (like the needle on a car’s gas gauge somehow goes over “full”). But what was this commercial for again?

Peter Fonda was in a much-ballyhooed Mercedes spot that played on his very old movie “Easy Rider.” If memory serves, the spot aired late in the game and I missed part of it. Oh, well.

Sorry, but I tend to remember the ads in the first half more than the second. By the fourth quarter, I’m too restless during the commercial breaks to continue sitting there. From a football standpoint, however, the fourth quarter was riveting -- which is what a championship football game should be, right?

Many of the commercials were great. For example, Ford had one early in the game that was one of the best seen all evening. The spot focused on how Ford is focused on the future -- positioning itself almost as a tech company.

Here on the morning after the game, I’m coming across critics really gushing about spots such as the Humpty Dumpty spot for Turbo-Tax and the Melissa McCarthy spot for the Kia Niro. I felt both were too elaborate and once again, on Monday morning I had to look up who they were for. 

The Spuds MacKenzie spot for Bud Light -- showing the spirit of this long dead spokesdog (seen in the photo above) taking a young man on an Ebenezer Scrooge-like tour of get-togethers he should have shown up for -- was also overdone. But at least there was no forgetting the brand based on this equation: Spuds MacKenzie = Bud Light. It’s that simple.

Also difficult to forget: That Pepsi sponsored the Lady Gaga halftime show. Message received.

Which brands benefited the most from Super Bowl 51? That’s an easy one: It’s a toss-up between the New England Patriots and Tom Brady.