Before you ask, I didn’t watch the super bowl yesterday. There are plenty of reasons not to. It’s long as shit, boring, and ultimately forgettable. Plus, I don’t watch any sports all year really, especially if I can’t walk up a long flight of stairs for a hot dog and a beer, so there’s really no reason to watch this one.
All of that aside, I’d like to pose another argument for not watching the super bowl. Namely: it’s bad television.
First off, even if you like football, the super bowl is rarely the best football game of the year. It’s the biggest, the most-watched, but that doesn’t mean shit. You know what else a lot of people watch? The World According to Jim. And that’s a show about a shitty dad mismatched to an attractive wife and the ways in which they do things like go out on a fancy dinner date on the night Jim is trying to join a big poker game, so he has to send another guy in who keeps calling him and asking him whether to fold, hit, or whatever, meanwhile his wife, who is wearing a dress that made the studio audience go Woo! even though it is not nearly as revealing as the Woo! would have you believe, is having the oblivious time of her life.
For TV to be really great, I need some kind of stake in it. Laugh, cry, slowly masturbate, whatever. It’s great to have an opinion on the bowl if your team is the one set to win, and I understand that if you live somewhere like Green Bay you fucking NEED it because you life in a shithole where they argue over who makes the best cheese curds. But for the rest of us, who gives a fuck? I care more about what happened to Howie Mandel’s hair than I care about watching men in tight shiny pants chase a ball.
The other thing people always want to talk about is the commercials. Here are the two things you are certain to hear today, Post-Super-Bowl-Monday:
1. “They weren’t as good as they were last year.”
2. “Oh my god, there was this one, and this baby, it did the best thing…”
Okay. Thanks for the update. They’ll never be as good as the commercials from last year, which you can’t even fucking remember anyway. And the last thing I need is to see a baby in a commercial doing something that babies don’t typically do. A baby who is the boss of a whole company you say? Ha! That’ll be the day.
The only commercial I want to see involving a baby is someone at a restaurant with a crying baby. After all the stares and trying to calm down the baby, the mother pulls a revolver out of her purse and blows the baby’s head all the way off, then calmly goes back to eating. What’s it for? Who cares? THAT’S memorable.
Good TV is memorable. Everyone remembers favorite episodes of favorite shows, or funny gags. People are saying Family Guy lines all the goddamn time. Not once have I heard someone quote a super bowl line. Probably because the super bowl is not well-written. We have commentators, who are half ex-football players, and then old motherfuckers who could bore the shit out of a story that involved a transvestite hooker with a full back Ghostbusters tattoo.
Which brings me to another thing. The amount of effort that goes into the super bowl, between the ads preceding it and the half-time show and all that other bullshit, doesn’t really amount to a whole hell of a lot. A season of the Office probably costs about the same amount in terms of work, and you get something like 10 hours of entertainment out of it. Super bowl? It takes a goddamn whole day, but the actual football parts can’t be more than a half hour. What the fuck is going on the rest of the time? And how did they trick us into watching people stand around on a field, some helmets on, some off?
Oh, and not to mention that, with the exception of politics, sports are the only thing on TV that you can miss entirely, then see the best and most important parts of over the next few days, also on TV. You don’t even have to try to see it. Someone will just show it to you. If you miss Curb Your Enthusiasm, you can’t watch an hour of pre and post shows and see all the best parts.
Bad TV.
Also, just a heads-up, if you are out and about during the Super Bowl, you’re essentially the Omega Man. I’m not saying that I’m going to destroy the things in your yard, but…watch the things in your yard.