Already I can hear them crying out. Tortured souls, stomachs full of chicken wings and chili, who for 15 minutes found themselves watching something on the TV that wasn’t to their liking and could conceive of no other action but to keep watching. A version of it happens nearly every day — something stupid, something disagreeable, something incomprehensible, playing on a screen, freezes our lower half to a seat just as hackles rise and the well-developed portions of the brain dedicated to the curmudgeonly response begin pulsing with annoyance.
But on Super Bowl Sunday, the 15 minutes of irritation that some experience during the halftime show grow in the mind’s eye into something of greater proportions. Complaints about a brief interlude of music and dance fall victim to a pervasive belief: It’s the Super Bowl, so nothing about it is allowed to be normal, including how upset we get about things we don’t like.
Setting the tone for the dramatic response are the commercials measured by the millions-of-dollars-spent-per-thirty-seconds. They reach us in immaculately tuned doses of pure advertising that seconds later have us already cycling back through and repeating aloud catchphrases and memorable moments.
Because so much can go wrong in an NFL season, the very act of a team reaching the Super Bowl transforms the game into one of colossal proportions decided by strange rules of fate that grow most powerful this time of year. Defenses win championships, until heroes emerge to beat those defenses, until the replay process decides that a catch isn’t a catch or that what isn’t a catch is, in fact, a catch. It’s insanity. And at its best, it’s incredibly fun. It brings people together to enjoy an unofficial American holiday that seems to particularly encourage the sharing of opinions about the matters at hand. Some days the Super Bowl’s ability to amass widespread interest can look like a gift to a polarized society.
But please, please, please: Can we stop losing our minds over the halftime show?
Somewhere along the way Super Bowl viewers seemed to decide en masse that the halftime show should be meant for no one but themselves, and the existence of other people with other preferences disappeared in the face of complaints that amount to variations on, “I don’t like how this sounds” or “I don’t like how this looks.” There is no universal archetype for the Super Bowl viewer. I’ve accepted that in life not everything is meant for me, and that’s okay. I’m still working on fully accepting a closely related concept: there is a difference between having an opinion and needing to share an opinion.
So, if the music starts and it doesn’t sound any good, and you never really were a Rihanna fan anyways, or you can’t remember the last time you enjoyed the halftime show, dig down deep, get up, and walk away. Dunk your head in a river of ranch dressing. Plug your ears with mozzarella sticks. Let the roar of crunching chips and dip take you to a better place. You can even change the channel before it starts. Just remember, it’s not an affront to your existence. It’s a 15-minute show, and on the other side of it, there’s still a whole half of football left to play.