The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly Of The 2024 Super Bowl Commercials

A few notes before we dive into a little rundown of the best and worst of the 2024 Super Bowl commercials:

• This list is by no means definitive or exhaustive and I might be mean to one you liked or leave off another entirely
• America’s best working commercial actor was too busy coaching the game to be in an ad this year
• We will get to it later but I have no clue how we ended up with two Flashdance-adjacent ads in 2024
• I have always hated the E*Trade baby very much

Here we go.

THE GOOD

ON ONE HAND: Too many commercials relied on the celebrity of it all this year, a trend that’s been bubbling along for years now and finally broke me this year. I think sometimes it gets in the way of having actual fun ideas for these things because the creative process kind of starts and stops with landing a big name.

ON THE OTHER HAND: I gasped when Beyonce showed up. Look at her having fun in there. Her acting career has had its ups and downs but I vote we give her another shot at a fun little ensemble comedy.

In conclusion, I choose to believe Beyonce and Tony Hale are friends now.

A few notes:

• We are now going on like four decades of having fun with Arnold’s accent and it still hasn’t gotten old to me
• Which is weird because I also watched the Christopher Walken ad and came away thinking, “We get it, he talks funny, let it go”
• I am allowed to be inconsistent

I don’t know. Maybe I was just won over by Danny DeVito popping up at the end. Especially since he tweeted this last night after the halftime show, too…

I kind of wish he’d been eating a huge Jersey Mike’s sub, too. Let Danny thrive.

This commercial contained two of my favorite things:

• A cool and empowering message that people can do a lot of things that the traditional guidelines of society often keep them from doing
• Video clips of kids absolutely getting wrecked

Good commercial.

Ugggghhhh I don’t know. I should hate this. It’s got everything I usually hate, from the unnecessary Boston to the Tom Brady cameo to… all of it. And yet.

And yet!

I found it charming. I think it was the stuff with Matt Damon that helped. But mostly it’s the thing where Ben Affleck legitimately loves Dunkin so much. Next year the ad should just be a 30-second compilation of paparazzi shots of him sipping an iced coffee set to that one Dropkick Murphys song with “Thanks to our most loyal customer” at the end.

Listen to me.

I love this for Michael Cera.

This one has:

• Lionel Messi playing soccer with a dog on a beach
• The song “Cuando Cuando Cuando,” which is awesome and reminded me of Game Night, which is a good movie
• A deeply perplexing Dan Marino cameo where Messi kicks the ball to him on a yacht and he catches it with his hands (not allowed) and then just whips it back to the beach like it’s a football?

Insane. I loved it. Ted Lasso was there, too.

There are not enough commercials where old ladies zipline to get revenge on their nemesis in the name of snack chips. I am always saying this.

THE BAD

Buying up time for multiple ads in one Super Bowl is risky business because it can get old and annoying really fast if it doesn’t work. I like Dan Levy and Heidi Gardner very much.

These ads… less so.

Oreos are too tasty to get stuck with a Kris Jenner Sliding Doors punchline. They’re good cookies. We don’t need to bring Ancient Greece and the afterlife into this.

I do not and will never care about what kind of mustache Chris Pratt has.

I understand that FanDuel was in a tough spot here with the recent passing of Carl Weathers but there is something existentially depressing about running a silly little ad with Gronk missing a field goal and then smash-cutting to a black screen remembrance of the beloved actor in the ad who died two weeks earlier.

Carl Weathers deserved better.

ON ONE HAND: Good for the entire cast of Suits for cashing in on their rocketship ride to superstardom after one billion people watched every episode on Netflix last summer for some reason.

ON THE OTHER HAND: Please imagine explaining any of this to the version of yourself that caught a few episodes of Suits on USA in like 2013.

It’s… weird, right? It’s really weird. Reasonable arguments can be made that more people recognized Harvey Specter than Bradley Cooper in the second ad. Think about this for a few minutes today.

THE UGLY

Two problems here:

• Do not make me have positive feelings about the jiggly gummy candy you expect me to eat
• Why are we doing Flashdance references in 2024?

WHY ARE WE DOING THEM TWICE, ACTUALLY?

I don’t know, man. Part of me wants to know how this happened, how we ended up with two separate Super Bowl commercials that riffed on a movie that came out before any of the players in the game were born. A bigger part of me just wants to sigh very deeply and beg advertising executives to watch any other movie. Good for Jennifer Beals, though.

“What if the E*Trade baby played pickleball?” is the kind of idea Pete Campbell would have pitched in an episode of Mad Men before getting berated by Don Draper and mocked by Roger Sterling.

This represents the nicest thing I can say about this ad. It’s fascinating, in a perverse way. I… I kind of want to hear the ideas that got rejected before they settled on this.

Most companies spend their whole budget on making a spectacle that airs once during the game.

Temu appeared to spend $11 on making this ad and then used the rest of their budget to make people at home watch it during every commercial break all night.

No thank you.

Trains should not destroy private property with an ice-cold blast of wreckage to deliver single cans of beer to awkward parties.

LL Cool J should have been arrested at the end of this commercial