The conventional wisdom goes that even people who don't like football like the Super Bowl (airing February 5 at 3 p.m. on ABC)—that's why it's one of the highest-rated programs on TV, drawing a massive audience in the era of satellite, digital cable, DVRs and hundreds of channels. The truth is more likely that people who don't like football tolerate the Super Bowl for the sake of social gatherings and the desire not to feel left out of a national cultural conversation. The good news for those of us who have no interest in gridiron battles is that there are now enough ancillary Super Bowl programs that missing the game no longer feels like missing out.
The longest-standing supplements to the Bowl are the commercials, which are scrutinized and hyped almost as heavily as the actual game. The ads have taken on such a life of their own that CBS will air an hour-long special devoted to them, Super Bowl's Greatest Commercials (February 4, 8 p.m.). The show will count down the 40 greatest of all time, culminating in a live reveal of the winner, as determined by online voting.
The special wasn't available for review at press time, but I hope CBS gives plenty of airtime to the Bud Bowl, Budweiser's series of commercials, which began in 1989, featuring CGI bottles of beer in football helmets running, passing and tackling in a rivalry (Budweiser vs. Bud Light, of course) as epic as any in the actual sports world. I remember dutifully watching the Super Bowl with my dad when I was a kid and paying far more attention to which beer was "winning" the Bud Bowl than to the main event.
This year's commercials will include the first-ever bilingual ad (from Toyota), appearances by chimps, Miss Piggy and Leonard Nimoy and more controversy from GoDaddy.com, whose racy ad featuring a scantily-clad model almost slipping out of her top made headlines last year, and whose latest entries were rejected by ABC for being too risqué. (Disappointingly, both the company and the network have been mum about the content.) Like the game itself, though, the commercials have become such an overhyped event that they are often disappointing. And if you want to catch them, you'll inevitably have to endure at least a little actual football.
Luckily, other networks have taken to offering targeted counter-programming for the sports-averse. The most common are marathons, including Charmed on TNT, Wild Weddings on TLC, America's Next Top Model on VH1, Gunsmoke on TV Land and Full House on ABC Family. ESPN will air the sporting polar opposite of football—a figure-skating championship—while Spike TV will cheekily offer a special entitled Very Worst Sporting Disasters (5 p.m.).
The best counter-programming comes on opposite ends of the wholesomeness spectrum: For the second year, Animal Planet will broadcast the Puppy Bowl, a free-form special in which, as the Yahoo TV listings so succinctly describe it, "puppies play." There's a mock field to fulfill the football connection, but really it's just three hours of cute little dogs running, tumbling, rough-housing and chewing on toys. This year's novel innovation is a halftime show featuring kittens.
A very different show will be featured on the third annual Lingerie Bowl, which airs on pay-per-view during Super Bowl halftime. With its teams of nearly-naked models engaging in what the event's press release calls "the ultimate catfight," and appearances by such luminaries as Dennis Rodman and Jenny McCarthy, the Lingerie Bowl is targeted at the macho, football-loving demographic, but it can just as easily be enjoyed by connoisseurs of the female form who don't also like watching men in tight pants tackle each other.
For the most entertainment value, try switching back and forth between the puppies and the models; now that's a television event.