Super Bowl XXXV

The teams of the National Football League managed to complete both the regular season and the playoffs while keeping most of their players out of jail, so once again the best of the AFC and the NFC (the Baltimore Ravens and New York Giants respectively) faced off on the grassy gridiron for the XXXVth annual playing of the Super Bowl on Sunday in the beautiful city of Tampa, Florida (Tampa Bay is not a city). And once again America responded by turning what would be just an outstanding football game in a less shamelessly exploitative society into The Greatest Corporate Entertainment Event of All Time, at least until next year's Super Bowl.

This year's Super Bowl featured the soulful song stylings of the Backstreet Boys, N'Sync, Aerosmith, Britney "Oops, I Augmented My Chest Again" Spears, Mary J. Blige and Nelly, interminable stretches of the most expensive commericals money can buy, reliably bland and occasionally fatuous commentary from Greg Gumbel and Phil Simms, an endless parade of useless satellite events, and just a little magic in the air, if by magic you mean "idiocy."

Last year, there was a week in between the conference championships and the actual game; the shorter interval spared us the worst pregame excesses, especially in terms of repetitive chattering about various players Triumphing over Adversity, even though Adversity was favored by 9 in Las Vegas. This year, there was no such respite. Baltimore linebacker Ray Lewis got asked so many questions about his recent murder trial that Baltimore coach Brian Billick scolded the reporters for asking them.

For those who didn't follow the trial, Lewis' lawyers basically argues that Lewis doesn't murder people, he just hangs out with people who do. It's hard to imagine why anyone felt the need to question this ennobling defense. Then the need to question the ennobling defense got a lot of media attention, and then the media attention to the need to question got a bunch of coverage, particularly from ESPN, whose football commentators often seemed on the verge of gasping in exhaustion towards the end of the second week.

To spell the commentators, CBS, ESPN et al. provided numerous sideshows for which commentary proved unnecessary. Ladies and gentlemen, you know something's wrong when you turn on the TV for the exciting conclusion of the Ultimate Defensive Player competition, in which various NFL defenders who did not play Sunday run through timed obstacle courses instead of, you know, playing defense, and the winner says without irony that it feels good to "come in and beat [the Tampa Bay Buccaneers'] Warren [Sapp] on his home turf." About 30 people had come to cheer the hometown hero, giving Sapp what must have been a massive home-field advantage. It was a typical meaningless sidelight in the two agonizing weeks leading up to the actual football game.

The football game as such wasn't much, except if you liked the Ravens or hated the Giants, in which case it was extremely entertaining. (Go Ravens!) Much of the country undoubtedly didn't care, and since the events of the game often found Phil Simms stumbling for words as he watched his former team get its collective ass kicked, CBS's "Eyevision" instant replay system became all the more important in holding viewer interest. Here we can say: Eyevision is both cool and useful. It consists of 30 cameras set up around the stadium in such a way that they can duplicate the rotation-in-a-timeless-space effects of "The Matrix" for replays on live television. Eyevision proved itself to be more than a gimmick quickly, with illuminating replays of both Baltimore's Jermaine Lewis (former Terp!) returning a kickoff for a touchdown and Baltimore's Jamal Lewis (Baltimore has a lot of players named Lewis) scoring a disputed TD. Still, if all it had been was a gimmick, it still would have held interest; the replays quickly became a most-requested feature of the broadcast.

In the category of least-requested features, of course, come the pregame and halftime shows. The Backstreet Boys did the national anthem straight, mercifully, and provided little to object to. MTV, which lives to provide things to object to, produced the halftime show, but the most entertaining part featured Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler as choreographers prepping the bands. The show itself was incoherent, as Aerosmith proved unable to staunch the badness coming from N'Snyc. The final big production number, a conflation-inflation of the Aerosmith and Run-DMC versions of "Walk This Way" featuring everyone who didn't get in on the main action, got a good cameo from Nelly but otherwise had little spark. (We also learned that Britney Spears has acquired scary, Lara Croft-ian breasts.) There were no dancing snowflakes or inane speeches this time, so the halftime show can be counted as "mediocre," but one longs for a return to the days of marching bands and cheerleaders.

Unfortunately, the commericals were just as uninspiring as the halftime show. Apart from a couple jarring spots from the American Legacy Foundation, which effectively conveyed the devastation cigarettes have caused in our country, no one showed up with anything interesting. Accenture, E*Trade and Cingular all provided bizarrely inept ads (and EDS had another in its ongoing series of inscrutable ads featuring tiny animals).

However, the big loser of the evening was Pepsi, which apparently changed its slogan from "The Joy of Cola" to "The Joy of Pepsi" when it realized that Coca-Cola is also a cola. Of four dumb commericals, the worst by far was a Bob Dole comic-misdirection spot, whose eventual substitution of Pepsi for the expected Viagra did not make up for the fact that for much of the commercial it looked like Dole was going to use his dog for Viagratification.

Still, once again, our national sports holiday was fun. Whatever anyone wants to say about the Super Bowl, trying to watch "Survivor 2: T&A OutBack" afterwards was quite a letdown (especially after CBS promoted the new "Survivor" like there was no tomorrow, which for CBS there wasn't). The Super Bowl itself - the sixty minutes of football - seems to be able to survive anything we throw at it, although we'll undoubtedly come up with even more harrowing tests for it next year.

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