Tom Brady, TV’s No 1 jaw, oozed stagnant charisma in Fox’s Super Bowl broadcast

The weeks leading up to this Super Bowl saw a predictable swirl of questions about the on- and off-field direction of America’s big game. Could the Philadelphia Eagles neutralize the golden arm of Patrick Mahomes? Would Travis Kelce commit elder abuse against Kansas City Chiefs coach Andy Reid again? How would the crowd react to the presence of the first sitting president to attend a Super Bowl? Might half-time show headliner Kendrick Lamar use the big stage to provide further insight into the content of Drake’s character? And would Sunday night cap the successful conclusion of Tom Brady’s years-long search for a personality, or would he remain the same on-screen plank who’s shout-talked his way through his first season as Fox’s top football analyst?

As ever, however, a bigger question hung over these small opportunities for speculation: would it be any good? As a game, as a spectacle, as a raw demonstration of American ingenuity and might, would Super Bowl LIX have the juice?

Well, now we have the answer: it would not. A non-entity as a contest and a televisual flop, this Super Bowl will live long in the memory of no one but fans of the Eagles. This was a Super Bowl so galactically bad that even Donald Trump – whose appearance at the event took on the sheen of a victory lap after a years-long culture war with the NFL essentially ended with the league’s surrender, and who drew cheers whenever he was shown on the screens inside Caesars Superdome – left early to beat the traffic. The president, perhaps embarrassed by his pre-game selection of the Chiefs as likeliest victors, exited the building on the stroke of half-time, conveniently missing the pointedly “political” performance that Lamar dished up during the intermission.

Related: Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl half-time show review – game over for Drake

This was no less than the NFL deserved for its abject decision to cave in on most of its differences with Trump. During the president’s first administration, the league became an unlikely bulwark of resistance against the Maga tide of insensitivity and hate. Now there’s been a reversal of course. Ahead of this game the NFL announced that the “End Racism” sign that has adorned the end zones for the past four Super Bowls would be replaced by “Choose Love” at one end and “It Takes All of Us” at the other. While the “End Racism” sign – a response to the post-George Floyd eruption of popular outrage across the US over police brutality and racial injustice – could be criticized as mere performance, its replacement by a sign preaching love seemed cynically hypocritical in light of the NFL’s new embrace of a president hell-bent on doing the exact opposite. Choose love! Unless you happen to be trans, undocumented, foreign, liberal, progressive, a member of the left, a government worker, anyone relying on food stamps or Medicaid for their survival, anyone who supports diversity, equity and inclusion, anyone who believes the ethnic cleansing of Gaza is bad, or anyone who didn’t vote for Trump, in which case: womp-womp, cry harder cuck, you are now an enemy of the nation.

In this bumbling superpower all the pomp and trappings of empire now seem irredeemably tacky, and last night the Trump-NFL alliance did everything within its authority to demonstrate how quickly things in this country are deteriorating. The night got off to a fittingly shitty start with a pre-game flyover by US fighter jets that could not be seen by anyone inside the domed stadium: a charming metaphor for the blithe stupidity of an America in chronic decline. Jon Batiste sang the national anthem as a pleasantly slinky low-impact cabaret number, like he was a hotel lobby piano man setting the background mood for a bunch of afternoon business meetings. Trump, who actively avoided military service himself, gave the anthem a salute as if he was a veteran.

The president’s presence in the crowd was always going to bring a strange energy to this game, and a sense of something broken or torn or not quite right suffused events last night. A hellish mashup of Trumpism, the Super Bowl’s traditional jingoism and fetishization of the military (the anthem, the super-abundance of flags and uniformed personnel, the pre-game flyover), and celebrity culture (Anne Hathaway bopping in the crowd, Paul McCartney chatting it up with Adam Sandler, Kevin Costner absorbed in conversation with Pete Davidson), this Super Bowl felt like a harbinger of the end times, a party to ring in the apocalypse. Royals (Serena Williams, Taylor Swift), tyrants (Trump, Gianni Infantino) and cheesesteak-flipping line cooks (Bradley Cooper) all get to let their hair down in pre-apocalyptic America: the new DEI in action. Lamar bravely attempted to infuse his half-time show with political critique, but the energy in the stadium seemed low, and the “message” may have been lost amid the Trumpy myopia of the night. Was this a sly comment on America’s descent into fascism, or Lamar ambling up and down the stage in dad jeans? Possibly it was both.

On the field, Kansas City’s hopes cracked almost as quickly as Jon Hamm’s voice did when he was introducing the team to the stadium before kickoff. Fox did its best to match the Chiefs’ on-field woes by getting most of the big broadcasting calls wrong. The network’s panel of sideline elders and wiseheads seemed almost bored by their obligation to comment on the game, and rules guru Mike Pereira frequently appeared to be asleep when called on to offer insight into various contentious officiating decisions, such was his delay in replying. Meanwhile the Fox scorebug – which displays the score, game time, and the offensive team’s progress up the field – was the “graphic design is my passion” meme come to life, a distressingly ugly collection of jumbo-font boxes and chaotically assembled data points that looked like it was produced by someone whose entire knowledge of visual culture came from a single afternoon “learning Photoshop” in 1998.

But this night, whatever the impact of Trump or Mahomes or Lamar, was always going to be about one man: Brady. Fox’s No 1 jaw popped up next to Kevin Burkhardt on Fox’s Bourbon Street set, beaming vacantly in a shiny suit like a man about to sell you a sofa. Throughout the evening the star Fox gameday duo, who’ve had six months to work together but still seem like they’re strangers waiting in the line for coffee whenever they have to exchange words, kept taking their jackets off then putting them back on again: the jackets were on for the pregame bits, off for most of the second quarter, back on for half-time analysis, off again for some reason, then back in place for the home stretch once the Eagles’ victory seemed assured. What fun! This frantic series of pointless costume changes visualized some of the despair that must now be gripping the Fox C-suite over their decision to spend $375m and lock Brady in as the network’s main game analyst for the next decade.

This was the biggest test yet in Brady’s fledgling TV career, and the results were not pretty. Brady’s early stylings here bore all his emerging signatures as a broadcaster: the weird absence of volume control; the unconvincing attempts at jocularity (“$8m for 30 seconds of advertising time, you’d need to save a lot of pennies for that!”); the statements of the obvious (“The question the Chiefs will be asking themselves is, ‘How can we find enough time for Patrick to make some throws downfield?’”); the sentences that begin with great confidence then trail off once it becomes clear to their creator that they do not contain sufficiently compelling intellectual content to justify their conclusion (“Patrick has that fear factor, everybody in this building knows it, everybody who watches football knows it, I’m really interested to see …”). Many of Brady’s throws to Pereira, prompted by dissatisfaction with some on-field call, were delivered with the deflationary intonation of a man who just missed out on the last slice of his favorite pizza at the local slice joint: “Oh, I don’t like that one bit. What do you think Mike?”

As the night wore on Fox’s star boy became increasingly squeaky, resorting in the game’s final quarter to a volley of desperately uninteresting anecdotes about his own career as a champion player. It was impossible not to feel a little sorry for the guy: though richly talented as a player, Brady has all the on-screen charisma of stagnant water and is clearly never going to rise beyond the mundane as a broadcaster. But more sympathy should be reserved for America’s viewers, who will be forced to mute Brady’s games for nine more seasons. And the most should go to Burkhardt, who used last night to debut what is, I believe, a new weapon in his game-calling armory: a strangled, hybrid sob-laugh that served the dual purpose of responding to Brady’s on-air inanities and signaling to viewers at home his deep distress at the next nine years.

After two Eagles players, with the championship assured, drenched Nick Sirianni in the ritual Gatorade shower administered to all victorious Super Bowl coaches, Brady monotoned, “That’s got to be a slimy, sticky shower. But who cares?” This had all of the big man’s customary head-scratching vacuity (what exactly does this comment add to the viewer’s appreciation of the action?) but was unintentionally a neat summary of the night. In the end, “Who cares?” may be the most fitting epitaph for the most forgettable Super Bowl in recent history. If the point of televised sports is to make the viewer at home feel as if they’re at the game, Fox last night pulled off a masterclass.

But hey, at least we got to see Seal as a seal.