We’re all done with Superbowl commercials, right?

It seems like every year they just get lamer and lamer. At this point, they’re just primarily regular commercials, the same as we’d see on any regular day. Even the “highlight” commercials really aren’t that fantastic, and they certainly aren’t worth watching, much less rehashing in the morning.

I watch football after the kids have gone to bed, which means I’m usually sacrificing sleep to watch it. I normally fast-forward as much as possible. For the Superbowl, however, I don’t want to fast-forward through any of the commercials, so I’m stuck with the whole 4 hours.

Was it worth it? For what? Aside from seeing a lot of ads, what did I gain? Were any of the commercials worth losing sleep over?

The smart thing to do would be just to watch the rehash of the “best” commercials in the morning. I saw a list of the “best” ones from this year…even the rehash is stupid. There simply wasn’t anything worth watching.

Maybe the commercials got worse, and maybe regular commercials got better, so the “special” ones don’t stand out anymore. Maybe in a post-wardrobe-malfunction world, it’s just too risky for the companies to do anything too crazy, and risk reprisal. Maybe in this economy people can’t afford to be frivolous with their ridiculously expensive air time. Maybe the companies figured out that a regular commercial gets about the same amount of publicity/revenue as a clever one, so it’s not worth the effort. Maybe the tolerance for commercials is lower, now that we generally fast-forward through them.

At least in the past, people would be buzzing about them the next morning. As far as I can tell, nobody is really talking about them anymore.

In retrospect, the whole thing was stupid anyway – were we really that amazed that commercials were entertaining? How did this get started in the first place? The first time I really remember it being a thing was during the dotcom boom. But I wonder if I went back and watched those commercials now, if they would still seem interesting.

Anyway, it’s done now. I’m declaring it over. Next year, feel free to skip them. Once we stop paying attention, the media will stop too.