Monday, February 05, 2007

Coke is it

The morning column link: a review of "Rules of Engagement" and a preview of tonight's "HIMYM" (more on that tonight).

Family responsibilities kept me from turning on the Super Bowl until 8:15. And in a classic case of DVR giveth/DVR taketh away, I was able to start watching from the beginning, then horrified to realize that, for reasons unknown, the recording stopped at the end of the third quarter, a fact I didn't discover until "Criminal Minds" had already begun and it was too late to fix. Sigh...

Fortunately, nothing major happened after that point, either game-wise or ad-wise, though I guess I missed K-Fed's pitchman debut. (Either that, or it happened during one of the earlier ad breaks that I skipped through out of a habit I had a hard time breaking.) I'll live. When I've done Ranking The Ads columns the past few years, I've pointed out that the quality of the commercials has been in decline for a while -- at least since the Dot.com bust -- but we're so conditioned to expect another "1984" or Jordan Vs. Bird that we keep watching. (It's like all those people still sticking around for "ER," I suppose.) Far and away my two favorite commercials of the night were Coke's "Grand Theft Auto" spoof and the ad about what happens after you put your quarter in the machine, and I understand both of them have been showing at movie theaters for months.

After those, my fave was probably Dave and Oprah, but there's nothing I'm going to rush to YouTube to watch again. Marian complained about the number of violent ads, and she wasn't the only one, though I don't know that I would tie it to Iraq War anxiety.

What did everybody else think? Were you more wowed by the ads than I was? Is anyone seriously contemplating a beard combover?
Posted by Alan Sepinwall at 10:00 AM

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

"ER" has been damn good this year :-P

I skipped the Super Bowl because I couldn't care less who won, although I saw a few of the ads online later (the Letterman one is my fave so far). I did see parts of the Puppy Bowl, however. So. much. CUTENESS! :-)

11:17 AM, February 05, 2007
Anonymous said...

Goulet!

11:31 AM, February 05, 2007
K J Gillenwater said...

The ads this year were terrible. Only a few were good...and wouldn't you know that included both Dorito's ads which were done by amateurs! The Budweiser ones, which are usually the most entertaining, were just bad. The only one that got a laugh in our house was the "rock, paper, scissors" one.

Goulet was great, Jim! And the Careerbuilder ads were funny just because of their creative use of office supplies.

11:44 AM, February 05, 2007
K J Gillenwater said...

Oh, and I almost forgot to ask: where were the movie trailers? Usually one or two big summer blockbuster films debut their ads during the Superbowl. That was a disappointment!

11:46 AM, February 05, 2007
Blankity-Blank said...

Jim Gaffigan saves the day. The combover one was stupid, but him calling Michael Ian Black "coach" in the karate class along with his final suggestion of how to repel a Sierra Mist thief were fantastic.

And I've seen those two Coke ads fifty thousand times before movies and never really liked them, but it seems even worse than they would try to pass them off on us in such a situation.
The simple one with the different bottles was okay though. The last line, "Especially today" was pretty cool though it did make the later similarly themed commercial (for Motorola?) seems really stupid.

The Federline one had little else to offer that you didn't already know. Which is a shame. I wonder if the leak is why they moved it so far back in the game. But his final "what?" as he's coming out of his daydream was delivered perfectly. so good for him.

11:56 AM, February 05, 2007
Anonymous said...

I watched Criminal Minds for the first time since the pilot, and I was not impressed. I tuned in to see Dawson Leery play a scary guy, but overall I thought the hour was dour, cliche and quite boring. I would be interested to hear what regular CM viewers think, but despite my Dawson curiosity I will not be tuning into the second part of the episode.

3:11 PM, February 05, 2007
Blankity-Blank said...

There's no reason to try to defend Criminal Minds. It's not the kind of show the kind of people who find themselves checking television-related blogs are going to like. Last year it was the most inconsistent show on. From great to terrible week to week. This year it's been more even which makes it, I guess, somewhat forgettable. This one was no exception.

The simultaneous case break is something they always do, which is weird, but finally they did something with it. I don't know that it was a good something, but something.

3:26 PM, February 05, 2007
Anonymous said...

Has any post-bowl slot in recent history been given a weaker push than CM was? I didn't see a single promo before halftime, then only a couple after that; I don't watch CBS much beyond football, Letterman, and Ferguson, but all the promos I've seen have been for one of the Bruckheimer shows. It's almost like the network was (appropriately) embarrassed.

The show didn't get to indulge much in its usual pathetic sadism... at least until that nice lady got torred apart by doggies. A shame. I was all prepared to call the FCC and complain.

Prince f'n rocked, as much as one could rock a Superbowl halftime show.

4:51 PM, February 05, 2007
dark tyler said...

Wow, apparently this Super Bowl was the third most-watched program in TV history, but (thankfully) Criminal Minds only had 25 mil. audience. Series high, duh, but still something like 30% shy of Grey's numbers last year. Thank Gawd this thing isn't gonna be the next TV senseation.

5:38 PM, February 05, 2007
Anonymous said...

That NY Times piece on the ad has got to be one of the dumbest things in the Paper of Record that I've seen in a long time. Maybe it's because I watch sports every week, but were those ads really more stupid-cartoon-violent than most of what you see during a regular-season NFL game?

I'm thinking of the Budweiser ads with the guy learning how to pour a good beer from the Mr. Miyagi stand-in who repeatedly whacks him in the nards, among other assorted humiliations.

Easily the worst ad, though, was that SalesGenie (or whatever the hell it was) with the dude and his new Ferrari. Really, really cheap-looking and lame.

5:45 PM, February 05, 2007

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