Although sports aren’t covered much here at Popdose, the Super Bowl extravaganza is beyond a mere football championship. The stars, the commercials, the halftime show, and finally the drama of the game itself can make the Super Bowl great television entertainment if everything clicks. Yesterday, everything did click in Super Bowl XLIII between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Arizona Cardinals, making it one of the most enjoyable Super Bowls in recent memory.
Of course getting to the game was a long journey, as NBC broadcast a six-hour pre-game show that featured Bob Costas, Keith Olbermann, Dan Patrick, Al Roker, and a slew of former football players and coaches including Cris Collinsworth, Jerome Bettis, and recently retired coaches Tony Dungy (Indianapolis Colts) and Mike Holmgren (Seattle Seahawks). Most of the banter between the hosts was similar to the programming you’d catch on NBC’s Sunday Night Football pre-game show, but slowed down considerably.
The bloated NBC pre-game telecast gave us an abundance of over-analyzing what each team had to do to win, interviews with some of the key position players, an interview with President Obama (in which he predicted a Steelers victory in a squeaker) and a one-on-one between Costas and halftime performer Bruce Springsteen. There were also a couple of season-in-review features done by Olbermann and Patrick, essentially recreating the shtick they mastered years ago on SportsCenter. The banter still works between these two after all of these years; NBC was smart in bringing them back together. But seriously, Keith, sweater vests? You can afford something a little better than that.
Rounding out the six hours of numbing nonsense (yet I couldn’t stop watching! What does that say about me?) were constant updates from the only two female reporters on the sportscast, Alex Flanagan (who amazingly tried to pull a Costas by quoting Fitzgerald when discussing Kurt Warner’s “Second Act”) and Andrea Kramer. To give the impression of this being an EVENT, NBC also held a Top Chef cook-off and had Al Roker interviewing B list stars out to promote NBC series like Heroes (which is apparently rebooting… AGAIN!) and Universal films such as Fast and Furious (starring Vin Diesel and Paul Walker…AGAIN!). We could have done without the fluff. A two-hour show would have been enough to feed my football hunger. (more…)
