America has become a fractured nation.  What I mean is that nowadays it is rare when the collective conscious of America is drawn to a single moment in time.  Going back forty, fifty, sixty years, radio and television broadcasts would bring people together to listen or watch significant events.  Presidential speeches, news and sports, and the like would rivet a nation. The homeless even would find a radio or TV set in a store window to catch FDR declaring war, Babe Ruth hitting a homerun, or men landing on the moon.  Even the presidential voting process is fractured as so many people vote absentee or not at all.  

September 11th was one of those few current events that affected us all, and we all communally mourned and feared for what would happen next.  For broadcasting, the advent of cable and satellite has diminished the ability of TV and radio to be a means of bringing a whole country together. No longer do we all tune to Uncle Walter or Ed Sullivan to watch the same exact occurrence with our neighbors around the country.  I believe that the collective consciousness helped build us into the super power we are today, and the loss of it can only make it harder to keep that power going into an uncertain future.

An interesting observation finds that the only non-disaster event in this day and age to be able to collectively bring together the people of the United States, and even the entire world, is the Super Bowl, seen in more than 200 countries around the globe.  This past Sunday, all kinds of people tuned into an American football game, and for a few hours the cultural zeitgeist was morphed into one.  The Super Bowl has become less a sporting event and more a kind of national holiday where we all gather together to celebrate being Americans — and, for those in foreign lands, to sneak a peek at a culture that prides itself on being a collection of vastly different individuals fused together by ideas of freedom and liberty for all.  It used to be exploration, wars, and other political events that brought us together.  Now it’s men dressed in funny uniforms running at each other like mountain goats chasing after an odd-shaped ball.  And what makes it all even stranger is the fact that most people don’t even tune into the broadcast to watch the game but to watch the commercials.  We have become a Wal-Mart culture where commerce is everything.

As a television program, the Super Bowl broadcast is overly produced, stuffed with such a vast array of fluff that it’s almost a parody of itself.  The teams are so over-analyzed and scrutinized beforehand that even a Mongolian sheepherder knows the point spread and what each quarterback eats for breakfast.  The actual game is always hit or miss, just like any sports contest.  Some games are close and offer on-field thrills to rival any event, and others are boring blowouts where you can almost hear a collective yawn from coast to coast.  Super Bowl XL happened to be better than most and at least made it to the final few minutes before the outcome was known.  But these days you don’t only judge the show on the merits of the game but on the commercials that run between plays.  There is even a show the night before previewing the commercials that will run the next day, so there isn’t even any surprise on that front which makes them as anticlimatic as the game.  

Now that I brought up the commercials, I guess I need to reveal my top faves in terms of entertainment and salesmanship.  I will say that this year there were no Apple 1984 spots to knock you off your chair or anything coming close.  There were a few that made me laugh out loud and a couple that even watered the eyes a tad, but as a group I would give this year’s crop a C+.  The ones I didn’t particularly care for were Coca Cola Company’s Full Throttle spots that were obviously trying to get those NASCAR aficionados to drink its new Red Bull knock-off.  I got tired of the Blockbuster and Pizza Hut spots because they kept coming and coming, and all the effects-driven spots all kind of morphed together.  Budweiser, the event’s leading advertiser, scored big with a couple of continuing Clydesdale spots.  A touching one where a young colt gets a little help pulling the beer wagon, and the streaking sheep that invades the horses’ own Super Bowl game were both cute and funny.  Ameriquest scored points with its airline passenger who winds up in a compromising position after a bit of turbulence, as did the Leonard Nimoy spot where the Star Trek veteran uses Aleve to help him give the seminal Vulcan greeting to a bunch of geeky fans.  Add ABC’s inventive “Addicted to Lost” promo and the Burger King Busby Berkeley build-a-burger revue, and those were pretty much the top commercials this year.  Oh, and for some reason the “Cheers from the world” spot from herestobeer.com made me choke up a little.  I guess if anything in this world could bring us all together, Rodney King not withstanding, we could do a lot worse than a mug of beer.  

You can view Super Bowl ads at either Google or at NFL.com.

Rich Burlingham