For those viewers hoping for exciting, high-quality performances in the Super Bowl Sunday night, the Baltimore Ravens and the San Francisco 49ers delivered in thrilling style. For those more interested in the advertisements than the football, the results were more disappointing, Stuart Elliott writes in The Times. The commercials, he says, “fell back on familiar strategies and themes’’ that would have been more appropriate for the Eisenhower administration, with a joke about a mother-in-law, a gag about the word panties and an ad set at a prom, among others. It was a missed opportunity for marketers, Mr. Elliott writes.
Thomas Tull, the head of Legendary Entertainment, is an outsider who has penetrated Hollywood’s inner ranks with a combination of moxie and charm – and a few ruffled feathers along the way, Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply report. Now Mr. Tull’s production company will have an unusually large piece of the blockbuster movie season, with six major releases by Warner Brothers, and the success of the films will help determine whether he can become an even bigger force in the film world.
Television success often results from unconventional concepts, and the FX channel offers stark proof of that, David Carr writes in the Media Equation column. It has embraced the dark side of narrative storytelling, led by its president, John Landgraf, and the result is a slate of shows among the most distinctive on television. Mr. Landgraf has “said yes to a lot of dark and spicy fare,’’ Mr. Carr writes, that is clearly intended for adults.
Teen Vogue is releasing its 10th anniversary March issue this week amid some encouraging signs, despite the challenges facing the magazine industry, Christine Haughney writes. It has endured where other offerings to the same audience – like Elle Girl and YM – did not, and its advertising pages for the fourth quarter of last year were up by 8.3 percent. But the magazine is still trying to address criticism from some young girls that it needs to show unaltered images, a greater range of body types and a more racially diverse group of models in its pages.
Dr. Seuss’s colorful characters wore hats of all shapes and sizes, and it turns out the author did too, Leslie Kaufman reports. Theodor Seuss Geisel, the creator of the beloved Dr. Seuss stories, had a collection of distinctive hats, and he would sometimes don them for inspiration when he was writing. Now, a new exhibit displays for the first time some of Geisel’s own hats, beginning Monday at the main branch of the New York Public Library.