Lazy, Stupid Nonsense: This Year’s Super Bowl Ads
TV happened last night. It was the one night of the year where we all come together and act like TV still exists the way that it used to: as something that people around the country all watch at the same time on the same channel. And even if you don’t care about football, or don’t understand the context behind Kendrick Lamar’s final death blow against Drake’s career, you might have still tuned in to the Super Bowl for what has become the game’s true main event: the ads.
People don’t care about Super Bowl ads because they’re actually entertaining, of course. Or because they care about the products that they advertise. There’s one reason people watch Super Bowl ads, and then read (or even write) articles like this afterward: to talk about what goddamned lazy nonsense they are now. At least that’s how people should treat them, and not as something that’s supposedly fun or entertaining. At some point the elevator pitch for every Super Bowl ad became “celebrity does something, literally anything, it doesn’t matter if it has any connection to our product or makes the slightest bit of sense, just get a famous person and we’re good.” That continued unabated last night, with a non-stop stream of celebrities doing things that nobody would ever do, and for no discernible reason. Famous award-winning actors hustling pickleball players for a shitty beer that costs maybe $15 for a 12-pack? A prickly, somewhat problematic comedic actor answering emails through Yahoo? A major Hollywood star, his semi-cancelled brother, the 72-year-old former coach of their local NFL team (and new coach of my dad’s alma mater’s team), and that coach’s 24-year-old girlfriend (?) as a coffee-themed band (??) at a fan convention (???) and competition (????) for coffee-themed bands? It literally doesn’t matter what happens in any of these ads; just get a famous person in front of a camera and wire like $20 million to the TV people to lock down your 30 seconds. Super Bowl ads are such a black hole of humor and personality that one this year even made Nate Bargatze unfunny. Not even Saturday Night Live could pull that one off, and it’s been making people unfunny for most of the last 50 years.
We’re a website, though, and need readers, so let’s push past our natural inclination to ignore this nonsense and actually dig into why this year’s Super Bowl ads were so especially bad. Here are some of last night’s worst, that collectively sum up why the whole concept of Super Bowl ads has run its course.
Willem Dafoe and Catherine O’Hara for Michelob Ultra
Let’s start with one that’s annoying for its weirdness and pointlessness but that at least stars a couple of good, talented, likable people who don’t really embarrass themselves. Here’s a Super Bowl ad where multi-time Oscar nominee Willem Dafoe and Emmy-winning comedy legend Catherine O’Hara want the cheap, low calorie beer Michelob Ultra so bad that they hustle younger, ostensibly more athletic couples out of their beer in games of pickleball. It’s not a concept that needs famous people in it—“old people can do things too” is a classic staple of shitty commercials—but without celebrities it wouldn’t get nearly as much attention as it has. Without celebrities that central conceit of two senior citizens (he’s 69, she’s 70) being so hard up for cash that they have to resort to underhanded athletic competition in order to buy an extremely cheap beer would be depressing, and a stark commentary on the rise in senior poverty in America. With celebrities it simply makes no sense. Dafoe is in like eight movies every year; dude can’t buy himself some Michelob Ultra? O’Hara is more selective in her work (although, according to Wikipedia, they also costarred in that Beetlejuice sequel last year) but there’s no way she’s at risk of not being able to swing a sixer of Ultra, no matter what kind of tariffs Canada might have to introduce during Trump’s idiotic trade wars. On one hand I want to give Michelob credit for not doing the most obvious thing and casting Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes in this as a reference to their White Men Can’t Jump hustlers; on the other hand that would at least make more sense. As it is it seems like Michelob’s ad firm just went down a list of recognizable actors until they found two willing and available to do whatever dumb idea they cooked up.
Ben Affleck and Friends for Dunkin’ Donuts
In 2023 Ben Affleck starred in one of the few celebrity Super Bowl ads that wasn’t completely inexplicable, one where he worked a drive-through at a Dunkin’ Donuts in Medford, Massachusetts. It fit both the star and the company’s public images, it played into the ever-popular Depressed Affleck meme, and the rest of America will always love making fun of Boston bullshit, so it was understandably a hit. Even with last year’s far less successful follow-up, Affleck’s desire to lead a Dunkin’ inspired boy band was portrayed as something ridiculous and laughable within the world of the ad; sure, it wasn’t funny, and it made the Ben Affleck of the Dunkin’ Donuts Commercial Universe seem like an absolute lunatic, but at no point did the ad want anybody to think the DunKings could actually be good. Well, here we are, a year later, and that’s been tossed out the Dunkins drive-through window alongside your box of Munchkins. Apparently the DunKings—who have lost Matt Damon and Tom Brady, and now consists of Affleck, his problematic brother Casey, former Patriots head coach Bill Belichick and his almost 50-year younger girlfriend Jordan Hudson, and infamous method actor (and Succession star) Jeremy Strong—are one of many popular coffee-themed bands, who are all competing against each other at an event called “Java Jam Battle,” with its own convention where “fans” get to meet the “bands.” (Yes, that’s Jay and Silent Bob in the background for like one second, for a patented Dunkin turbo shot of “why the fuck not.”) Here the joke isn’t really on Affleck or his bandmates, but on the pretentiousness of the “barista” band, and on Strong’s dedication to “the method.” You know how the Fast and Furious movies started with them stealing DVDs and eventually saw them flying a car into outer space? Ben Affleck’s Dunkin’ Super Bowl ads are on that same trajectory.
Seal and Becky G for Mountain Dew
Stupid nonsense has been the driving ethos of Mountain Dew ads since they stopped being about young hot people jumping into lakes, so I almost skipped this one. This is what Dew ads do, this very ad ends by acknowledging that, so singling another one out is meaningless and does exactly what they hope it’ll do. (This entire goddamned article is playing into the hands of these companies and their ad agencies, of course, but apparently being a TV editor means writing about TV ads too.) But given how much attention (most of it negative, not that Dew cares) the “Seal as a seal” ad has gotten, I know some yahoo would complain in the comments if it wasn’t on here. So yes: Becky G and some hairy guy in a green coat that I assume we’re supposed to recognize (a football player, maybe?) come across a herd of seals singing a version of “Kiss from a Rose” about Mountain Dew Baja Blast, and yes, the lead seal has the face of ‘90s hitmaker Seal. It’s a grotesque image, something Mountain Dew is known for, and also incredibly lazy. The less said about it the better. Let’s move on.
Meg Ryan, Billy Crystal and Sydney Sweeney for Hellman’s
Hellman’s gives us the latest example of the Super Bowl ad at its laziest. It recreates a joke from an ‘80s movie that, in the decades since, has been referenced to death and stripped of whatever humor it might’ve once had, using the same actors from that ‘80s movie, before ending with a pointless bonus cameo from one of today’s buzziest young stars—who, of course, wasn’t even alive when that ‘80s movie came out. I won’t begrudge When Harry Met Sally stars Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal their payday (poor guy just lost his house) but Sydney Sweeney popping up in a mayonnaise commercial to deliver Rob Reiner’s mom’s line from the movie adds nothing and reeks of sad and sweaty desperation on the part of both Hellman’s and Sweeney. Look, all these ads are terrible, but this one might be the most annoying, simply because of how lazy it all is. It’s just nostalgia but now with mayo. Ryan and Crystal are still likable, at least. If they did literally anything else in this ad it would’ve been better.
Matthew McConaughey and Many Others for Uber Eats
When one cameo isn’t enough, just go absolutely hog wild and cram as many famous people into your ad as possible. That’s a reliable Super Bowl tactic, and the one taken by Uber Eats this year. Uber Eats upped the celebrity quotient of its Matthew McConaughey-starring ad by filling it out with Martha Stewart, Charli XCX, Kevin Bacon, Greta Gerwig, the Hot Ones guy, and a very large man who may or may not have been William “Refrigerator” Perry. The high concept here is that football is a conspiracy to make people eat food, as McConaughey explains across the decades. (At one point he shows up as Mike Ditka circa 1986. Why? So people will talk about it.) It’s not funny, it’s not clever, but at least it’s about football, kind of, which ultimately makes this very bad commercial maybe the least bad one on this list. Hell, it’s nowhere near as terrible as that one for an AI company with McConaughey eating at a restaurant in the pouring rain.
If any ad last night made decent use of its celebrity, it was Jeep. Jeep was smart enough to let Harrison Ford just be his grumpy old self. They put him in a place you associate with old guys—some kind of hunting cabin, in front of a roaring fire, with a dog nearby—and let him grumble on about old guy stuff, which, yes, includes Jeeps and war. Let this start a wave of Super Bowl ads where celebrities aren’t given asinine scripts to read or scenes from 40 years ago to recreate, but where the director calls action and the famous person just kind of talks about something vaguely related to the product for a little while. Those ads might be shaggy, they might be boring, they might not have much to do with whatever they’re pitching, but a lot of that is true of today’s ads, too; if they tried less hard to be unforgettable with their cameos, absurdity, and nostalgia, maybe we’d actually remember some of these Super Bowl ads for more than a day.