It’s been three months since NBC aired this year’s Super Bowl, which means it’s time for one of the more psychologically harrowing of America’s various modern-day rituals: Sifting through the complaints the FCC receives about The Big Game every year to see what’s sticking in the psychic craws of the kind of people inclined to send a strongly worded, if often weakly sentenced, letter to the government about a football game.
Luckily for those of us who enjoy having our heads dunked in the festering ink of this sort of collective Rorschach test, the FCC took a break from policing Whoopi Goldberg-based rhetoric this week to release the 2,000 or so missives it received from the variously outraged peoples of America in response to NBC’s broadcast. (That’s the largest volume in years, by the way, beating out the response to the 2020 show—which also, coincidentally or not, featured an appearance from 2026 headliner Bad Bunny.) It’s a massive enough trove that the Commission had to break it up into 5 parts, but that doesn’t stop it from being unsurprisingly uniform in content. Because, yes, there were some complaints about the show’s advertising (most notably it kicking off with a trailer for Scream 7), and some very understandable requests that NBC do a better job of providing closed captions for both the show, and its commercials. But the vast majority of the comments we saw during this year’s trawl were about Bad Bunny, and people’s collective horror at hearing words in Spanish, looking up what they could have been later, and then dropping their monocles into their various beverages of choice.
Many of these comments can be summed up by one that sort of gave the whole project away, from a writer hailing from Eagle River, Wisconsin: “I must admit, I didn’t watch it, but I recently read about it.” It turns out that a lot of people either heard Bad Bunny singing in Spanish, or heard about Bad Bunny singing in Spanish, and then went and looked up the lyrics to his song “Safaera,” which he performed a very short excerpt from during the show, and got outraged. And, yeah: Uncensored, the lyrics to “Safaera” get pretty vulgar, something many FCC complainers demonstrated by very obviously copying some translated lyrics from either Genius or ChatGPT. Thing is, the version of the song that went out on public airwaves back in February wasn’t uncensored: Bad Bunny changed some of the lyrics himself, while the broadcast bleeped the most obviously vulgar line. (I.e., the singer’s hardline declaration that “If your boyfriend doesn’t eat ass, he shouldn’t eat anything at all.”) It was, in other words, a pretty standard take on a raunchy song being cleaned up for a TV broadcast, albeit maybe just a tad hornier than what the NFL usually broadcasts.
None of which managed to dissuade the FCC complainers, who came up with some truly amazing bits of the English language to complain about the Spanish-language show. One author, for instance was upset that the song contained “erection boasts,” while another was very upset that the lyrics supposedly discussed genitalia, “Starting with a P and a D, he also talked about a female upper genitalia starting with the T, as well as the male genitalia starting with the letter N.” (Points to anybody who worked that last one out without looking it up: It’s “nipples.”)
The comments also described a nation truly trapped by its television sets, desperate to shield their children’s eyes from the image of people dancing while being unable to do so. (A roughly one-second clip of two men grinding on each other cropped up in at least 50 percent of complaints we reviewed.) One horrified, exclamation point-happy writer noted that “Super Bowl half time show was lewd and vulgar! Bad Bunny kept grabbing his crotch, etc.! My grandkids had to leave the room!” Another reframed the show as a desperate race against time: “I cannot undo what my family heard last night. It took me several minutes to change the channel and turn of my amplifier, but the damage had already been done.” But the most heartbreaking one we found was a reminder that Bad Bunny can break out anytime, anywhere, even in our safest of safe spaces: “Please investigate this matter thoroughly. I watched this at my local Dave and Busters and saw many parents visibly disturbed during the halftime performance with many leaving the viewing area until the event concluded.”
The FCC ruled back in February that it hadn’t flagged any actual violations from the show; neither Dave nor Buster could be reached for comment on the matter by the time we went to press.
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