Super Bowl Psychology, 2026

Congratulations to the Seattle Seahawks, who won Super Bowl LX with an absolutely suffocating defensive display on Sunday night. The “vibe” online was that this was a rather boring Super Bowl to watch, and while I understand that sentiment, I disagree. There’s the schadenfreude that comes from watching the previously dominant Patriots lose, preventing a repeat of their dominant years back when Tom Brady was their quarterback (this Steelers fan is grateful to remain tied with New England for the total number of Lombardi trophies!). There’s the revenge story from eleven years ago when the Seahawks lost to the Patriots on the last play of the game. And who can deny the great death-and-resurrection story of Sam Darnold, the Seahawks quarterback? The stone that the builders rejected has become the capstone, and it is indeed marvelous in our eyes.

A low-scoring, defensive-minded affair like this, of course, means that the commercials have to be that much more entertaining to keep viewers engaged. This is the seventh installment of Super Bowl Psychology, a look at what the advertisements played during the Super Bowl say about the national American psyche. If a company is going to pay between $8 and $10 million dollars to make an ad pitch to roughly half of all American adults, then they’re going to do their market research on the American zeitgeist to make the best pitch possible. There’s a lot of money to be made — and a lot of money to lose — on this once-a-year pitch to the last bit of America’s monoculture.

But you know what? This year’s ads sucked. They were terrible, well short of the standards I’ve watched in the previous six years. The prevailing attitude in my living room was disappointment, frustration, pandering, and a sense that we’re being dragged into a future that nobody wants outside of venture capitalists. To that end, here are a few thoughts on the state of the American psyche as revealed to us through the ads of Super Bowl LX.

Try-Hard Humor

Truth be told, I find Shane Gillis to be a funny comedian most of the time, but everything that went wrong with this year’s humor ads can be summed up with his Bud Light commercial. The ad features a keg of Bud Light rolling down the side of a steep hill being chased by the attendees of a wedding reception. The scene is fantastic: people in suits and nice dresses stumbling and tumbling down a hill in slow motion to a Whitney Houston power ballad. The keg eventually stops, everyone rolls to the bottom of the hill, the beer is enjoyed, and everyone is happy. Shane Gillis then deadpans to the camera and says of the happy couple “I give it a week,” implying that the marriage will soon fall apart. It’s a dark and sarcastic note at the end of an otherwise fun commercial.

Most of the Super Bowl humor missed the mark this year. More celebrity cameos, more rehashing of previous years’ themes. Matt Damon and friends are having fun with Dunkin’ Donuts. Football is about food, still, for Uber Eats. The Greek avant-garde film director Yorgos Lanthimos directed two commercials that were funny mostly if you know who Yorgos Lanthimos is (I didn’t and had to Google him). SNL heavyweights like Bowen Yang, Heidi Gardner, Colin Jost, and Michael Che did what they could with the scripts they were given.

Most of the humor this year fell under the category “Ah! Look at the silly celebrities,” which is but one of many categories of humor that can be explored. Celebrities rolling down a hill. Celebrities hamming it up for melodrama. Celebrities as the object of a sight gag. It eventually becomes the same joke told a dozen times over, with diminishing returns that run out before halftime. The popularity of celebrities can be measured by the algorithm, and it’s just way too easy to plug and play a famous person into a dull advert instead of putting anything creative together for that celebrity to do — to say nothing about the digital de-aging that many of them underwent (more on this below).

The exception to this trend was Liquid Death and their joke about making people’s heads explode, which my six-year-old found to be uproaringly hilarious. 

The Dystopia Is Real

Last year’s crop of ads included AI’s first forays into the Super Bowl ad market, and my criticism of them then was that they solved problems that most people don’t have (dinner reservations, airport gate changes, etc.). This year, AI ads actually addressed the issues that I think many informed consumers care most about, which is the dystopian future that they can represent. The best of these was Chris Hemsworth imagining Alexa killing him in a number of gruesome and terrifying ways. Another featured a personal trainer responding to a question in AI monotone with advertisements. That one Svedka Vodka commercial was entirely composed with generative AI, and I’m sure the tool played a healthy part in other commercials too. The problem with all of these, of course, is that instead of reassuring us that their AI future is bright and happy, they play up AI fears for laughs instead. 

It wasn’t just AI either. Ring cameras ask us to imagine a world where they can all connect to help find a lost dog, which sounds great until you realize that the same technology can be used to track specific people too. AI.com is coming, so get your handle there now before you’re locked out. Mr. Beast continues his brand of Squid Game–light competitions. Emma Stone can’t get her website domain name (and destroys laptop after laptop, a joke about her not knowing how domain names work, I guess?). 

The worst of these comes from Xfinity, which imagined that if only Jurassic Park had better Wi-Fi, then the dinosaurs wouldn’t have escaped. There’s something remarkably tone deaf about using a story of technological hubris to feature your own company’s technological hubris. 

No Patience for the Sick or Ugly

Gone, dear friends, are the advertisements for snack foods. This year’s commercials featured a distinct lack of junk-food hype. Lay’s was the only snack brand making play this year — Doritos were notoriously absent. Pepsi only chose to advertise its zero-sugar product instead of the “good stuff.” Nerds had a candy commercial, and so did Ritz crackers. Even the beer ads were pretty sparse, and (outside of Dunkin’) I didn’t see a single fast food advert show up on my screen.

Why is it that the biggest snack food holiday of the year was overwhelmed by ads about weight loss drugs, broken healthcare systems, and the dangers of processed foods? GLP-1 drugs were this year’s new kids on the advertising block, with Wegovy and Zepbound making big splashes with their advertisements. (Why was Serena Williams sponsoring a weight loss drug when she is clearly the epitome of fitness and health? Kenan Thompson and DJ Khaled make a much more compelling case.) It wasn’t just weight loss drugs either. There were multiple butt-related commercials with singing toilets, reminders to eat fiber, and prostate exam alternatives. There were male grooming ads featuring talking piles of discarded facial, chest, and pubic hair. There were darkly conspiratorial ads about the broken nature of America’s health system and food production.

It seems as if America’s body positivity moment has passed. If we are sick, fat, or ugly, it is now our fault, and instead of thinking about our favorite football snack foods, we need to get on a GLP-1 and slim down enough to be acceptable in the public square, which is increasingly online and only accessible to those who play the gorgeous game.

The Enshittification Super Bowl

Forgive the rude language, but the term “enshittification” is one that we’ve explored on the site before. It’s the official term for when a cultural phenomenon that used to be good becomes co-opted by a mix of the profit motive and influencer culture, resulting in a decrease in the quality and goodness of the thing. Some examples: Enshittification is when streaming platforms started showing ads, when search engines started prioritizing paid answers instead of the best answers, when tech companies force unwanted AI into perfectly functional software, and when social media platforms prioritize sponsored content over the content of friends and connections. Good products are made worse for the sake of shareholder return. 

How in the world, you might think, can the great commercialism holiday of the Super Bowl become subject to enshittification? Isn’t it already driven by the profit motive? Yes, of course, but this year an unspoken viewer/producer contract has been violated. The implicit trade-off of Super Bowl commercials is that if the commercials are willing to connect with us through humor or pathos, we will give them our attention and consideration. Be a clown. Be a storyteller. Be a dramatist. Make us feel something, and we’ll stay in our seats instead of hitting the loo. 

This year in particular, the ads have metaphorically (and in many cases, literally) lacked human connection. And that is really the zeitgeist, isn’t it? The exchange of our immediate human connection for the technological mediation of celebrity and virtue? The rejection of our bodies as they are in exchange for a medicated and screen-approved version of ourselves? The guilt and shame of not being athletic enough, beautiful enough, thin enough, rich enough, or smart enough to exist in society with any dignity? Even the celebs need to be digitally de-aged to feel relevant to our nostalgia. These are the same forces that have made life, ehm, “shitty” in the real world. Since there’s profit to be made from making us feel these negative ways, they become the default modes of being in all aspects of life. 

This year’s best ads, then, were the ones that resisted that trend, which helped us to connect through something universally understood. Give me a heartrending story about a Clydesdale horse and a bald eagle being friends. Let the girl who moved to the new neighborhood find her lost dog and make friends along the way. Even when Coinbase — a company I will never do business with because I believe crypto to be a scam — devoted its airtime to Backstreet Boys karaoke, my wife and I sang along with joy, teasing our children and making Grandma laugh. These were the best of the bunch because they fulfilled the contract to make us feel human.

Perhaps the most human of this year’s Super Bowl ads was the “He Gets Us” piece, which hit home with a pointed rejection of the “more, more, more” nature of this year’s zeitgeist. It was countercultural in the best way, landing in the fourth quarter of the game after all the inhuman ads to ask: “What if there is more than more, and what if Jesus told us how to get there?” It’s a great question. The New York Times agreed, giving it the #4 spot in their list, saying: “The Christian ad campaign deserves credit for devoting most of its spot to a montage chastising the preoccupations — with money, material goods, physical appearance, online distraction, gambling — that most of the commercials around it are feeding.” Chastise is a strong word from the NYT — the ad doesn’t put a moral valence on modern life other than to say it is unfulfilling — but the compliment is warranted.

In short, a traditional celebration of American life and the ways we universally laugh and cry together has been replaced by forces that want to make us feel isolated, ugly, and sick so we’ll spend money to feel otherwise. That’s the enshittification of Super Bowl commercials. Let’s hope next year’s batch is more inspired, creative, and human. 

Strays:

• Some oft repeated themes worth mentioning: Two Mr. Rogers-themed commercials were welcome additions to the mix this year. Two Backstreet Boys ads. Two commercials also featured Sofia Vergara too, highlighting the Latin American flavor of this year’s game.
• Gen Z was well represented, I thought, in this year’s ads. Sabrina Carpenter’s Pringles ad was the perfect balance of celebrity and absurdist and wistfulness of never being able to find love.
• A theme that returned from last year: There were a lot of classic rock soundtracks in ads this year.
• Another symptom of enshittification in the Super Bowl: There is no correct take to have on the halftime show. The culture wars have swallowed it up to the point that commentary is nothing but an act of signaling. If I were to say, for example, that the NFL is free to have the world’s biggest artist host its halftime show, but I didn’t personally like the show because I don’t speak Spanish and didn’t understand what was going on … this reasonable and sensible take would be the target for all sorts of internet fodder.
• I wonder if the Olympics synching up next to the Super Bowl had any influence on the body/health/fitness focus of this year’s adverts. My family was just as impressed by the feats of strength in the Olympics commercials as they were with the feats of strength from the NFL players.