As my wife and I have done for the last several years, on Sunday we sat down in front of our oversized LG TV to watch the most American of events:

The Super Bowl Commercials.

Neither of us cares much about the football game that keeps interrupting these commercials (she’s not much of a sports fan, and I vastly prefer baseball), so some may call it a waste to sit here for four hours so we can catch 30 minutes of ads, but here we are.

I highly doubt any of these will prove memorable, but a few stood out—though not always for good reasons.

• Instacart took an early lead for the best ad of the game with their assemblage of grocery store mascots. It was great to see Old Spice Guy. “I’m on a porch.”
• David Beckham and his “twin brother” Matt Damon pitching Stella Artois was adorbs—especially the in absentia diss of Ben Affleck.
• Disney-Hulu’s what if… spot annoyed me, mainly because so few of the properties shown were actually Disney creations—I caught only Frozen and the live-action Lion King; the rest were acquired from Lucasfilm, Pixar, Marvel, Fox, even Hulu. And it felt vaguely threatening, somehow. Also: The YouTube comments are hilarious—and brutal.
• Ritz’s “salty” made me snort, which made me salty. Also: Weird hearing slang my co-workers were using 15 years ago, in a cracker commercial.
• Rick Ross’s Hustlin’ as the soundtrack to Willem Dafoe and Catherine O’Hara’s pickleballing for Michelob Ultra was hilariously incongruous. They looked like they were having fun. Whip it, whip it real hard.
• The pointillist OpenAI piece—“All progress has a starting point,” suggesting generative AI and ChatGPT will be (is?) as fundamental as fire, the wheel, and the internet—felt like a still-too-early, self-congratulatory self-assessment. It also reminded me, at least in its dot-based design, of Apple’s “Intention.”
• Meta’s Ray-Ban AI-powered glasses perfectly captured the boorish behavior I assume of its wearers.
• NFL’s “I am somebody” ends with “Any kid can be somebody. If they have somebody to show them the way.” Which, OK… but suggests that kids aren’t simply somebody by virtue of being themselves? They need to have their somebody-ness externally validated? I loved the message right up until the end.
• On the other hand, Nike’s You Can’t Win was absolute perfection. 10/10, no notes.
• The breast screening spot from Your Attention Please/Novartis was… eye-catching—and hopefully equally effective for convincing more women to get screened.
• I loved the mid-’80s high school dramedy-inspired push from NFL Flag 50 to grow girls’ variety flag football. “I’m Brad./I can read.” The YouTube comments are—shocker!—filled with a bunch of pissed-off (what I assume to be) men.
• Harrison Ford for Jeep was moving and welcome, and the end cracked me up. “This Jeep makes me happy, even though my name is (Ford).”
• Energy Transfer’s “life without oil and gas products” was just disgusting. I’m OK with the world needing petroleum products, but why advertise it during the Super Bowl—and in a hospital devoid of these products, with a pregnant woman on the verge of giving birth? Tellingly, comments are disabled on YouTube. Just as well, they’d surely get roasted.
• I don’t think I saw this Uber Eats football conspiracy during the game, but it was part of a collection I caught beforehand, and it’s a Top Three contender.
• And of course, the reunion we’ve all been waiting for: When Harry Met Sally for a Sandwich. “I’m competing with a condiment.”

There were also a handful of needle drops designed to make me feel either old or co-opted. Or both.

In addition to the (at least time-relevant) use of Rock You Like a Hurricane in the flag football spot and the previously noted Hustlin’, Hims & Hers scored their weight-loss medication to Childish Gambino’s This is America, while Poppi pitched flavored bubble water with Deee-lite’s wonderful Groove is in the Heart. This last one killed me a little, much as Microsoft selling Zunes using Afrika Bambaataa’s Planet Rock did 17 years ago.

People Magazine offers a full Super Bowl ad recap, along with comprehensive coverage from TV Insider and Adweek.

Oh, and the Philadelphia Eagles dominated the Kansas City Chiefs, 40-22, in a game that wasn’t nearly as close as the final score suggests.