Stay tuned: The past 24 years of the Super Bowl lead out show

     The 1996 "Friends" episode "The One After the Superbowl"
     is still the most watched Super Bowl lead out show ever.

Here’s the thing about not being a professional: you’ve got to make sure real life is taken care of first before you commit to what you’re passionate about. And with that in mind, I present to you an examination of Super Bowl lead out shows in March.

The question that seems to constantly perplex the networks is, “What makes a successful, and hopefully good, lead out show?” Just because a network figures something out one year, doesn’t mean it can be emulated for their next Super Bowl year, or even the next calendar year.

So for no real reason other than me liking lists, I decided to take a look at the last two decades of lead out shows (1990-present), arbitrarily put them into “great,” “good,” “bad,” and “ugly” columns, and talk about where and why things went right or wrong. At the end, we’ll regroup and talk about what we’ve learned and what the postgame slot might go to next year.

"The Office" - "Moving On": Lord, beer me strength

     Destined to be together. Too bad they apparently stopped
     listening to each other say stuff.
     Photo Credit: NBC

14 year old me probably never thought I would say this, but tonight's episode of "The Office" was horrible. A complete and total mess on every level.

An episode of "The Office" in the 2010s was bad? Stop the presses. Yeah, this show has been a complete mess for about three years now, but never in a way that I felt, or that made me finally realize, I needed to sit down and pen an essay about why I hate so much about the things "The Office" has chosen to be.

Greg Daniels promises a good final season for "The Office" - do I believe him?

Note: This has been a work in progress since last week, so a little bit of the wording is off re: dates. "Tuesday" refers to last Tuesday, August 21.

On Tuesday morning, I took a fun trip to the dental surgeon to have my wisdom teeth removed. Meanwhile, as I was enduring a good deal of pain, somewhere in California, Greg Daniels was relieving a great pain of mine by announcing that the upcoming ninth season of NBC's "The Office" would be the last for Scranton's paper pushers.

I fell in love with "The Office" pretty quickly back in the summer of 2007. Within no time, I suddenly found myself quoting the show constantly and anxiously awaiting the premiere of the fourth season. To my sadness, the show hit a rough patch and slowly but surely has become a pale imitation of its former brilliance. In this writer's opinion, seasons one, two, and three are near perfect; season four has a batting average of about 2/3; season five is probably about half, and has the four or five "Michael Scott Paper Company" episodes carrying it; season six is largely forgettable outside of the Jim and Pam wedding and baby episodes; season seven saw a great sendoff for Michael Scott, and was decent considering how much of the show was broken by then; and last year's eighth season was pretty much horrible.

So I would say that going into the ninth and final season, I am the least cautiously optimistic than I've ever been in the second half of this series. Greg Daniels, who helmed the show during its brightest years, is returning to help send Dunder Mifflin off into the sunset. And he's promised the following changes (courtesy of OfficeTally.com), to which I've attached my opinions.