When the present is divisive and the future is scary, pop culture's biggest event plays “remember when.”
In 2022, with those characters, like me, now in the target demographic for the Super Bowl’s nonstop appeals to yesteryear, “Don’t you forget” sounds a lot more like a command. After all, Facebook, whence Meta sprang, both destabilized the society of the present and functioned as a kind of eternal photo album and 24/7 class reunion. This is the future we can all look forward to, the ad says: becoming outmoded and discarded, broken in a broken world. Saved from the trash compactor, it is put on display at a space center, where someone slides a set of virtual-reality goggles onto its head. Thus we have met a menagerie of talking animals, become familiar with the Budweiser Clydesdales and heard from a host of celebrity endorsers. The past was everywhere in the Super Bowl ads. But now the future is confusing — see all the ads for cryptocurrency — or scary. The Super Bowl, as a rule, discovers music when that music’s audience discovers high-fiber diets, and the price of admission was knowing that this revolutionary soundtrack was now dad’s treadmill workout playlist. (Football itself is a cultural throwback, really, its TV broadcasts being the last vestige of the mass-media era when Americans still watched the same TV shows at the same time.) But any attempts to distinguish the new series are drowned out by reminders of the old one. This year, NBC spotlighted “Bel-Air,” the new teen drama on its streaming sibling Peacock, inspired by the ’90s sitcom “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” But from the vantage point of the 2022 Super Bowl, where he headlined the halftime show, it was also a pretty accurate forward-looking statement.