Fin: The best of the Super Bowl, a new Bee Gees movie, and the golden age of sports media

This week's notes column

Like everyone else, I watched the Super Bowl on Sunday, which broke ratings records, resulted in another championship for the Chiefs, and left all of the frothing buffoons who believe in the Travis/Taylor/Pfizer conspiracy — 20 percent of the country, it appears — very, very sad.

It seemed like Vegas was a very good host city, one likely to join the regular rotation, and it made me upset that I now haven’t made it out there in almost a decade. But no, they absolutely should not have Major League Baseball.

You’re not going to believe this, but the New York Post’s media columnist Phil Mushnick thought everything about the game and broadcast was shameful and wrong, from Travis and Taylor to the halftime show, and — worst of all — “Lift Every Voice and Sing.”

As for the commercials, they seem to slip more and more every year. There were just about no good creative ideas, with way too many of them amounting to stuffing 7 or 8 celebrities into the same room and hoping something funny happens. It’s like during the Robert Mueller era when SNL used to have A-list actors show up every week to play different members of the Trump Administration but forgot to write anything funny for them to do. 

The Christopher Walken car ad was amusing, if a little dated; wasn’t “Everyone Thinks They Can Do a Christopher Walken Impression” more of a touchstone of the popular culture of 15 years ago, than of now?

On the other hand, there was one big ancillary creative triumph on Super Bowl Sunday: The Nickelodeon alternative broadcast, which spun nothing but gold for four straight hours. They had SpongeBob and Patrick working color commentary for the whole game, with Tom Kenny and Bill Fagerbakke doing their own little MST3K episode. Just about every clip I saw of that made me laugh my ass off.