Dorothy

The names on the lineup are good gets. They're all big enough to get booked for the other halftime show. Indeed, two-thirds of them have played it. It's just that until you see any evidence to the contrary, you have to question whether any spectacle can match what has been a run of Super Bowl performances so exceptional as to make almost bearable the gridiron played either side of it. Kendrick Lamar, Bad Bunny: these are artists at the top of their game and the top of the charts, the sort who bend the cultural conversation around their every verse.

It has been a while since Madonna has done that. Probably not since "Confessions on a Dance Floor," so perhaps that's why she has returned to that classic album with the quite excellent "I Feel So Free" preceding the launch of "Confessions II" barely a fortnight before the World Cup final. Stick that one in the set list, chuck in "Vogue," "Hung Up," "Intro The Groove, "Like a Prayer," of course, and ... aaaah, yeah. Well, you're well over your 15 minutes there, and you've still got two-thirds of your lineup to go.

They won't even get to watch some really good pop songs. "Dynamite" might be the most audaciously cheesy and relentlessly brilliant slice of three and a half minutes in BTS' career. There's a lot of competition there. "Waka Waka" will go off, but Shakira, I have one request. Can we squeeze in "Zoo" somehow? Seriously "Zootopia 2," what a film. I didn't think they had the minerals to follow that first one. Top, top, top.

Then again, to quote my personal heroes Statler and Waldorf, this doesn't sound half good either. It's a bad idea executed fairly well. If we must have a halftime show, this looks like it should be a perfectly reasonable iteration on the format, even if it really wants for a star of the moment, a Sabrina Carpenter or Harry Styles. Then again, why exactly must we have this? Grade: C