A guide to CBS shows we’ll see commercials for during the Super Bowl

The Super Bowl is on CBS this year, the record 20th time televising the NFL’s biggest game for the network. In addition to the various expensive Super Bowl commercials on Sunday, we will be inundated with ads for a slew of CBS shows. If you don’t have a grandparent around to ask, here’s a guide to some of these shows.

This is the most well-known of the bunch, a ratings bonanza in its 12th and final season. Big Bang Theory in 2018 ranked third in average ratings (NBC’s Sunday Night Football was second), and coupled with the spinoff show Young Sheldon ranking sixth, expect to be beaten over the head with ads for these two shows on Sunday.

The others are not as familiar.

This new talent show premiere’s after the Super Bowl. We already have American Idol (on ABC) and America’s Got Talent (on NBC), but by definition those are national shows. This has “world” in the title, so the field is presumably bigger.

The World’s Best was created by Mark Burnett, who also brought us The Apprentice. But luckily host James Corden was born in the U.K. so we don’t have to worry that the monster maker will have a second disaster president on his hands. At least not from this show.

Some of the most prolific CBS self-plugging is of the show Bull, known most notably for the unacceptable “workplace harassment” and toxic environment surrounding star Michael Weatherly, as described by Eliza Dushku, who was paid a $9.5 million settlement by the network after she was fired by the show.

Despite the controversy surrounding the show, we somehow still see a barrage of ads for it, more and more helpings of bull. For a show based around someone hired to analyze the members of a jury, you’d think the network would be able to read the room.

Reboots and revivals are all the rage, but this incarnation of our favorite island detective as a huge miss. Nothing about the commercials make this seem watchable. Maybe if Magnum took the Murphy Brown and Roseanne path and came back with the original cast this would be better. I’d rather watch Tom Selleck argue with Rosie O’Donnell for an hour than invest any time in Jay Hernandez and the new cast.

Another reboot here, which is somehow in its ninth season. What? How?

At the very least, the show gave us one of the least plot-driven in-episode product placements of all-time, with this very important and relevant Subway diversion.

“It worked for Jared!”

Just when you thought the idea of watching every waking moment of strangers in a house couldn’t get any more insufferable, we now have a celebrity edition of the format, now in a second season for some reason.

The big reveal on most of the earlier commercials for this abomination was that political bozo Anthony Scaramucci was involved. But it turned out he was just a ... fake guest? What in the world is going on here? I would have been better off not knowing any of this, but since it’s stuck in my head now I must share it with you as well.

I’m so sorry.