Content Consumed: The Super Bowl, Rihanna, The Last of Us and more

Hey hey! I hope you all had the most wonderful weekend—I did! In today’s edition of Content Consumed, we’re chatting about…

⚡️ The Super Bowl, its ads, and Rihanna!!!
🌓 The Last of Us, episode 5, was the series’ peak so far
🚫 Matty Healy on Cumtown/The Adam Friedland Show
🥀 Book review: A Certain Hunger

Let’s talk Super Bowl, baby

Well, it happened. Jackson Mahomes’ brother snagged another Super Bowl trophy. The game was good, too, right up until that botched call with one minute left that gave the Chiefs the game. Let them play, damn it! Anyways, fly Eagles fly.

Other noteworthy bits, mostly concerning the commercials:

• J.Lo stole the show in Ben Affleck’s Dunkin commercial.
• The Tubi bit did exactly what it was supposed to do.
• Bradley Cooper got a ton of airtime in a bunch of commercials and as the NFL’s main hype video’s narrator (with DJ Khaled, naturally).
• QR codes are still, unfortunately, savoring the spotlight. Nothing more 2023 than pulling out your phone to scan a code on your TV screen during America’s game of the year.
• The Avocados from Mexico campaign… was something. It did something! What it did, I do not know. I think people are buying enough avos, right?
• Netflix is trying to get back in our good graces with multiple partnerships, like with GM electric vehicles.
• I was expecting more from M&Ms, considering their multi-month buildup to this.

But more importantly: Rihanna’s halftime show.

Rihanna!!! The first pregnant woman to headline the Super Bowl halftime show (A$AP Rocky…don’t go online rn. You’re getting dragged to oblivion for keeping this woman from making more new music).

She plugged Fenty beauty, she wore a giant red coat in tribute to good friend and late designer André Leon Talley, she played all the hits (yes, including Kanye collabs, without Kanye—deal with it), and she looked and sounded incredible. Not a note missed.

To the haters who said there should’ve been a feature or two: you’re wrong! Rihanna owned it. I do wish she had played a song or two from ANTI, and I do wish she had played new music, but I’m still veryyy happy with how it went. That final shot… woof.

The Last of Us: Episode 5

What?! Zombies in a zombie show?! Noooooo!

Just kidding. It was good, really good in fact. Every time you think a character might have a multi-episode arc… you’re pranked. Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey)? She’s a goner. Henry and Sam? How dare you get attached.

We keep butting against the age-old question: who’s a bad guy and who’s a good guy—especially in a zombie apocalypse? Kathleen blames Henry for her brother’s death, and in a deep twist of ironic fate, Henry ends up being forced to kill his own brother. Circle of life, I suppose.

Kathleen, at the end of the episode, is determined to be The Most Bad Guy in our current situation. You’re not a good guy if you’re saying an innocent deaf kid with leukemia was “supposed to die”.

Beyond these moral dilemmas, we get some skilled sniping from Joel, a freaky child Clicker coming after Ellie in a van, and a horde of undead rising from the ground alongside a Bloater, who seems much more intent on killing rebel soldiers than spreading the infection (which is the goal of the rest of the undead, theoretically).

But the last scene is, of course, the heartbreaker. Sam is infected. Ellie’s hopeful that her immune blood will cure him. But nope: in the morning, he attacks Ellie, older brother Henry is forced to kill Sam, and then turns the gun on himself out of grief. Traumatizing shit. Ellie is no longer having fun, that’s for sure.

Here’s to next week!

Yeah, we’re talking about Matty Healy again

Matty Healy, the lead singer of The 1975, is no stranger to controversy. He seems to revel in it, really. Why else would he go on The Adam Friedland Show podcast (formerly known as Cum Town; always known as offensive, full of slurs, fake edgy, and problematic)?

Things Matty Healy said/did on the show that people are pissed off about include…

• Matty and the hosts made a number of derogatory remarks about women. Like, too many to list here. Some are genuinely disturbing, some just annoying. Like women getting “f*cked up by the moon” when having their periods. “Meanwhile, we went there — men!”
• They brought up the 2007 Glasgow Airport attack and imitated the Scots language, calling it “r*****ed English”.
• They discussed Ice Spice and her ethnicity, remarking that she could be Hawaiian, Inuit or Chinese, mocking the accents of each. Apparently Matty slid in her DMs and she didn’t take the bait (another reason to love Ice Spice).
• They did impressions of Japanese people working in concentration camps. For what reason? I do not know.
• He hit a mention of child porn with a “SHOUT OUT!”
  Shout out to child porn? Really?

Okay, I’m done. I’m getting too mad reading about it. I didn’t listen, because I refuse to give Adam Friedland more metrics, so I’m just going to be pissed off reading recaps.

Book review: ‘A Certain Hunger’

Argh, my hopes were so high.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m glad I read this BookTok favorite. We all love a girlboss MILFy cannibal, right? It was so close to being so good, but the author’s inability to not take herself so seriously almost killed the entire book.

We didn’t need, for example, 20 pages describing how to prepare meat with kosher methods. It somewhat makes sense within the context of the book, and I really wasn’t that grossed out by it and many, many MANY more descriptions of meat (human and animal), but really it just felt like the author flexing her research. It was, unfortunately, boring. This aggrandized literary verbosity carried into over-descriptive chapters about the differences between Atlantic and Mediterranean shrimp, the tenets of psychopathy, etc. It could’ve worked if it was layered more into the narrative, but instead we suffered through random and excessive chapters that didn’t have much to do with the plot or characters at all. Just a bit pretentious and self-indulgent.

What we, the reader, were really interested in — and what the author DID do a great job with — was this psychopathic murderess’s relationships and her singular friendship. Emma, the friend, was easily the most fascinating character in this entire faux memoir, and I believe her storyline wrapped perfectly. I wish we could have gotten tastes of Andrew, our narrator’s actual only true love, earlier in the book. I think it would’ve contextualized the rest of her relationships so much better.

I’m glad I read it. I pushed through the boring bits and it was worth it in the end.

Whew, baby! That’s it for today. Thank you all so, so much for reading! If you’re not already, be sure to follow this column for more Content Consumed in your inbox every weekday.

Lots of love,
Casey

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