SANTA CLARA, California – A Super Bowl halftime show whose early going promised to make it one of the franchise’s worst ever managed to evolve, briskly, into something far more interesting; a meta-commentary on various star personas and on the Super Bowl halftime show itself.
The segment of the show belonging solely to Coldplay was the set’s worst. Though the band was the halftime show’s notional headliners, it was the least relevant-seeming of the three acts onstage.

Bruno Mars, whose father is half Puerto Rican, and Beyoncé had been invited, the language around the show suggested, as a nod to the franchise’s “history” and yet they felt far more urgent and intriguing than the British band, whose act was also plagued by significant audio problems.
Lead singer Chris Martin’s onstage leaps felt like an attempt to gin up the sort of enthusiasm that Mars, with the opening bars of his hit Uptown Funk, generated organically.
Mars and Beyoncé are a part of halftime show history, sure but it’s very recent history. They performed on the world’s biggest stage two and three years ago, respectively. (One wonders whether Katy Perry, last year’s headliner, felt snubbed.)
The two transcended not merely expectations but Coldplay’s tepid set. Indeed, the British band practically disappeared for minutes as first Mars then Beyoncé performed recent hits Uptown Funk and Beyoncé’s new hit Formation, then took part in a dance-off.
That the latter star announced the Formation World Tour in a commercial immediately following the set felt apt; she has clearly entered a new era, building on the themes of social consciousness and complicated feminism present in her prior work (and in her 2013 Super Bowl set).
Mars had a new hit to perform; Beyoncé, in putting forward a new song that’s about her pride in her race and dressing in militaristic regalia that recalled the Michael Jackson of 1993, had new things to say.