Do not buy the "crypto is out, booze is in" Super Bowl framing. The framing should be: "For Super Bowl ads, reboots are in again."Please, think critically. The "crypto bowl" last year wasn't about crypto. It was really about a series of things you recognize from TV and movies: a "Sopranos" reunion; an Austin Powers reboot; Jim Carrey reprising his role from The Cable Guy; a short Pete Davidson "SNL" sketch; a "Community" reunion; and Larry David, Martha Stewart, Guy Fieri, Andy Richter, William Shatner and too many more to list here all doing the things you remember them doing from TV. Kudos, Coinbase, although that spot was inspired by the DVD menu. Advertising is a mirror, and the industry's reflection of American culture is exactly as exhausted as least year. This year's panicked, barely comprehensible reaction to an American culture that eludes advertising's understanding? Reboots. Again.
This Sunday's Reboot Bowl features remixes of Caddyshack; Zoolander; Clueless; Risky Business (kind of); "Squid Game;" "breaking Bad;" "Eastbound and Down;" Sarah McLaughlin's early 2000's SPCA commercials; "Comedy Central Roast;" the old six degrees of Kevin Bacon game; and the Paramount+ mountain of remembering stuff from TV, the ne plus ultra of reboot commercials. Yes, we're giving the industry a lot of TV and movie reboots to reflect back at us. But the entertainment industry's creative bankruptcy doesn't represent the entirety of our hopes and desires. There's more. Even an industry as overwhelmed, distracted and behind as advertising is right now should be able to dig and find something worth putting back into our dreams.
The Trouble with Reboot TV: "So often, on TV as in apps, research and algorithms seem to manifest our lowest impulses as an audience, even the ones we would rather not have — say, a weakness for stupefying predictability..." (NYTMag)
The Shorter Stuff
"Somehow, hostility to the ultrarich has become a marker of modish cultural literacy." (Vulture)
"Fleischman Is in Trouble" is really fucking with "a certain set of New York women." (The Cut)
The AI-Generated, Never-Ending Seinfeld Twitch Stream, Explained (Pirate Wires)
Google has more than 30,000 middle managers. (Bloomberg)
Guy with all the money in the world refuses to give up status. (NYT)
The only thing this piece gets wrong is that "Family Guy" never fell off. (Vice)
The dubious rise of Impostor Syndrome. (TNY)
Very readable piece on the reality TV-ification of documentaries. (Vulture)
Inside the Implosion of Justin Roiland’s Animation Empire (THR)
Kids watch 60% more TikTok than YouTube. (TechCrunch)
Meta's Horizon, aka Fortnite for moms, has set a goal of 150,000 monthly cross-screen Horizon users by the end of the first half of 2023. (WSJ)
The most annoying people in Bushwick? (Curbed)
‘The soul of L.A.’: 20 years after his death, the stars are aligning for Warren Zevon (LATimes)