• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, 10 hours ago

What will this year’s morning-after Super Bowl TV Blog look like?

If past Super Bowl blogs are any indication, this year’s edition will comment on the commercials, the pregame and halftime entertainment, and the quality of the broadcast on NBC.

As always, the TV Blog is excited by this Sunday’s big game, despite the fact that the Eagles aren’t in it.

Expectations are as high for Super Bowl LX as they are for Super Bowl Blog XII by the same author of this blog since 2015.

Looking back at the previous 11 of them, the commercials have taken center stage, naturally.

Negative categories have included tasteless commercials, violent commercials, nonsensical commercials, social-message commercials (especially them) and commercials that are so elaborate that the brands they are advertising are easily forgotten.

More often than not, the TV Blog gave thumbs-up to commercials that were fun to watch and commercials that communicated a clear, straightforward sales message that says: Here is our product and here are the benefits.

Of the latter, WeatherTech got mentioned again and again. So did each network’s promotion spots for upcoming new shows. These are usually great.

I read all of my past 11 post-Super Bowl TV blogs yesterday, but did not actually count the number of commercials deemed bad, good or indifferent.

But the overall impression was that bad commercials outnumbered good ones.

Some of the commercials that were negatively reviewed here are so memorable that I did not need to read all of the past Super Bowl blogs to remember them.

One of them was the Springsteen spot for Jeep in 2021 that had Buzzkill Bruce driving alone on a highway in middle America and complaining about life in America, the country that made him a rock star. 

Another was the Kia Telluride spot in 2019 in which a sad-eyed little boy described his small Georgia town as possibly the worst place on Earth.

The problem with these spots, as always, was that somehow their creators thought these depressing commercials were wholly appropriate for the joyous annual holiday in America known as Super Bowl Sunday -- second only to July Fourth.

Other spots I do not even have to look up in order to remember them include the infamous Cure Auto Insurance spot in which a man reached across a table to cruelly and violently yank out a screw that had mysteriously lodged in the forehead of the woman seated across from him; and the Doritos spot in which a fetus shot out of a woman’s womb like a cannon.

These were certainly tasteless, but others were tasteless for other reasons. One was a 2018 spot that used a portion of a Martin Luther King Jr. speech to sell Dodge Ram trucks.

What were some of the worst commercials in some of the TV Blog’s Super Bowl recaps? In addition to the aforementioned spots, they included a Nationwide Insurance spot in which a little boy lamented that he did not live long enough to enjoy a full life (2015); a commercial in which Michelob Light was positioned as a health drink (2016); and the nonsensical Coca-Cola Energy spot that had Martin Scorsese, 76, desperately trying to connect with Jonah Hill, 36, so they could go out nightclubbing together (2020).

Plenty of commercials came in for praise in the Super Bowl blogs over the years, but one still towers over all the others for its simplicity and innovation.

It was the 2022 Coinbase spot that was nothing more than a square QR code bouncing lazily off the sides of the TV screen like the ancient Pong video game. 

This activity lasted for a full minute, giving viewers plenty of time to scan the code, which a great many of them did. 

It was mesmerizing, which is a rare thing for a TV commercial in a Super Bowl or anywhere else in the television universe.