Ho-Hum: Bowled Over by Gimmicks : Television: The Super Bowl follows a dubious tradition of tricking viewers into watching forgettable programs.

Dallas-shmallas, Buffalo-shmuffalo. Another year, another Super Bowl.

If it’s so essential, so meaningful, so Norman Rockwellian, so much the soul of Americana, then why is it so readily forgotten?

Oh, you can count on a handful of sports reporters and other professional zealots continuing to dwell on Buffalo’s repeat loss to Dallas on Sunday, as if the defeat were Napoleonic, something that should matter deeply to the global multitudes.

On Monday night, for example, Jay Leno did a bit with Buffalo quarterback Jim Kelly, who somehow got himself together despite being widely depicted as a disgrace, a discredit to humanity, after Sunday’s loss to the Cowboys. Meanwhile, David Letterman used his Top 10 list to give Buffalo coach Marv Levy the business, and his first guest was victorious Dallas coach Jimmy Johnson. Letterman: “This is a dumb question, and you probably can’t answer it. . . .”

“Dumb” is what applies to this nonsense about Levy. He could discover a cure for the common cold and still be the butt of jokes, viewed as an abysmal failure for repeatedly failing to win the Super Bowl. C’mon, now, it’s a game, one . . . game, one that truly matters only to a very few.

It’s just chic or politically correct to give the impression that you care.

For years now, the Super Bowl has been television’s super gimmick, Madison Avenue’s mother lode of hyperbole, a Roman-numeraled gold mine of seductive, stone-chiseled marketing scam that the public is irresistibly drawn to the way salmon instinctively swim upstream without knowing why. The interior beeper beeps, and off they go.

Such is the power of super gimmicks.

You could argue that Super Bowl Sunday is one of those rare days in which much of the United States becomes a community, united with a single focus. Fewer criminals are on the streets, too. But the artificially induced camaraderie in front of the television set, whether in homes or in bars, is not only fleeting but also hollow, a momentary high. All you’ve got afterward are drained glasses.

The A.C. Nielsen Co. estimates that about 45% of U.S. television sets and 66% of the total TV audience were tuned to Sunday’s game, a figure that translates to a record audience of nearly 135 million. That’s boggling, especially as two-thirds of those viewers arguably had no particular interest in Dallas or Buffalo or even Bud Light. And many of those who weren’t watching probably felt compelled to prove to others that they cared.

The phone rang Sunday. “Who’s winning?” the caller asked about the game that I wasn’t watching.

The question came from a sports illiterate who probably was also wondering if anyone in the Super Bowl had hit a home run. “Who’s playing?” I asked the caller mischievously.

“Buffalo and Houston?” came the tenuous reply.

If you don’t know who’s playing, why care who’s winning?

The answer, of course, is that it’s the Super Bowl.

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You’d think that television would have made Americans gimmick-resistant by now. Instead, the opposite has happened. Viewers have become desensitized to the sheer abundance of TV gimmickry. It’s relentless. For example:

* Sally Jessy Raphael’s ever-present box of tissues for inevitably teary guests? Gimmick.

* The use of live reporting to freshen old news? Gimmick.

* The oral signatures of newscasters (from Walter Cronkite’s “That’s the way it is” to Jerry Dunphy’s “From the desert to the sea”)? Gimmicks. When I worked in Louisville, a guy there signed off this way: “Since you were, thanks for watching.”

* Catchy movie ratings (thumbs up/thumbs down or “on a scale of one to 10”)? Gimmicks.

* Some earthquake reporting? Gimmick. There on KNBC-TV Channel 4, the day after a magnitude 5.0 aftershock, was Rick Chambers: “You know what it felt like, here’s what it looked like on the Channel 4 ‘seismo-cam.’ ”

That’s rich. Somehow experiencing the reality doesn’t quite hack it. You’re asked to watch the “seismo-cam,” as if Channel 4’s gizmo had a life of its own, as if your emotions needed to be validated by a needle making scratchings on a sheet of paper.

* Weathercasts that use maps with moving parts? Gimmicks. When I was a kid in Kansas City, the top TV weathercaster was the guy with the biggest gimmick. Facing viewers from behind a clear, plexiglass screen, he’d have to write backward as he put up temperatures. Very cute. Naturally it made him a star, setting him apart from competitors who wrote normally.

But that was quaint compared with today’s high-tech TV weather maps, which convey movement--that’s the point--but not visual information that you can process. On KABC-TV Channel 7, while Dallas Raines is mentioning a high pressure ridge, blue dots are moving across his map. They tell you nothing except that blue dots are moving across his map.

Newspapers never engage in such stunts. Meanwhile, since you were, thanks for reading.