Super Bowl is a platform for anyone's message

It may have started with puppies, but now everyone wants in on the big game.

Key and Peele, Alicia Florrick, Jason Bourne, Stephen Colbert, President Obama, Conan O'Brien, James Corden all showed up, in one way or another, during Super Bowl 50 Sunday.

With diminishing audiences for just about everything, the Super Bowl has become one of the few mass-media platforms still standing, and it isn't just advertisers climbing aboard.

It's the media themselves.

While the Carolina Panthers unsuccessfully battled the Denver Broncos on Sunday: CBS took the opportunity to announce that the critically acclaimed series The Good Wife, and viewers' relationship with Julianna Margulies' Alicia, would end with this season; Universal unveiled a super-cut Matt Damon in the now officially named Jason Bourne; and various publications circulated stories and statistics about the danger of the game that everyone was watching.

In the best example of counterprogramming since Animal Planet launched Puppy Bowl, the comedy team of Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele appeared on Squarespace.com as Lee and Morris, two clueless lunatics realizing their dream of becoming Super Bowl commentators in a show called Real Talk.

With no knowledge of the game and legally unable to provide actual commentary, the two spent the evening arguing with their lawyer, asking many questions of a guest referee, talking about their feelings and grilling callers about their party food. Toward the end of the first quarter, however, they glanced at the television screen long enough to see the commercial for their show.

"That's us," they yelled, before returning to their hilarious interviews with a guest psychiatrist and off-the-wall conversation about "a person who's athletic and who's done a very athletic thing."

A pair of satiric digital Super Bowl commentators commenting on their non-satiric Super Bowl ad: Life does not get more media-meta than that.

Well, actually it did. The pair followed up their three-hour-plus performance by joining (in a pretaped segment) the special live postgame edition of The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. Which also included an appearance by the president and has been promoted with a near-hysterical frenzy.

Just as the Super Bowl ads are increasingly scrutinized, the show following the game has become the subject of much tea-leaf reading: Is the network going with its strongest player or trying to bolster ratings for a critical favorite?

All this on top of the chorus line of celebrities who fill the game's many commercial breaks, often making the evening seem more like an awards show than a sporting event. But at this point, the Super Bowl is the only real safety raft available.

The great irony of the television renaissance is that the increasing number of shows and platforms make it impossible for even the most popular show to draw the huge numbers of days gone by. Only the Super Bowl draws a real-time national audience - an average of 111.9 million viewers Sunday, making it the third-most-watched TV show ever, according to Nielsen.