Watching the Super Bowl in France

This morning, I watched last night’s Super Bowl. Since it started at midnight here, I wasn’t about to stay up to watch it live, but DVRed it instead. I’m on semi-vacation this week, winding down from several months of a heavy workload, so I spent a couple of hours this morning watching the game.

First, congratulations to the New Jersey Giants (sorry, I can’t consider them to be a New York team). They played a solid game of defense, and that amazing escape from almost getting sacked and the just-as-amazing catch with less than two minutes remaining was stupendous.

But I wanted to talk about the fact that the Super Bowl is on TV in France. This is the second year that it has been live on a public television channel (in previous years it had been on a pay channel). It’s interesting that the French are trying to embrace football (or, as they call it, American football). There are a few amateur teams in France, none of them very good, and, for several years, there was an “NFL Europe”, with teams in a half-dozen European cities. (NFL Europe shut down in 2007.) There was also, for a couple of years, one French player in the NFL. (He got cut before this season.) So it remains a little-known sport, in spite of attempts by the NFL to get better recognition, especially by selling their “NFL Game Day” highlights show to French TV.

During the game, we listeners had to bear the French commentary, which is certainly less experienced than US announcers, though it might have been less annoying (I haven’t seen a football game on US TV in more than two decades, but I assume that the announcers haven’t improved much). We also didn’t get commercials; at least not many. French TV has far fewer commercials than US TV, and notably doesn’t have commercials during shows. For the Super Bowl, there were two or three commercial breaks, but the rest of the time, the US commercial breaks were opportunities for the French commentators to talk; and talk; and talk. They said essentially the same thing at each break, which meant that I simply fast-forwarded when they came on.

This lack of commercials is interesting, especially when comparing sporting events. Soccer, for example, is played without breaks – there are two 45-minute halves in a soccer match. Yet for all the reduced commercials we get here, you actually may see more ads during a soccer match. Soccer fields are surrounded with ad boards, some of them moving, some of them electric, and about 2/3 of all shots on TV include at least one ad. Contrarily, American football is one sport where there are still no ads visible on the field and very few in stadiums. I’ve been astounded to see how many ads there are in baseball games (the quintessential sport for commercial breaks), and find the ads behind the backstop to be the epitome of annoying. Hockey is almost as bad, with ads on the boards. Back in the days when I lived in the US, none of these sports had ads visible when watching TV.

I could rail about Americans accepting so many commercials – 18 minutes per hour for TV series and movies – but that will have to be the topic of another post. At least I got to watch the Super Bowl here with no ads. But the paradox is, being the Super Bowl, I had to go on the web to see the commercials, since it is often a venue for some of the most interesting commercials. Alas, this year was not a good one for commercials, and the game was certainly worth watching.