Many of the stars who appear in NBC’s retrospectively haunting “Brotherhood of Man” Super Bowl ad were happy to croon about their love of the Peacock network. Some…weren’t.

“Chevy Chase walked off the set on the Community shoot,” says Allan Broce, the advertising vet who masterminded the now 10-year-old promo. At first, the comedian was “being a good sport, and he pitched the idea that he would maybe fall down as he was dancing”—a reference to Chase’s signature move during the original run of Saturday Night Live. “But then another hour rolls on, and suddenly Chevy starts bitching. Pretty soon he’s like, ‘What am I doing, waiting around to do some stupid song and dance for NBC?’ And he leaves.” (Chase hasn’t yet responded to a request for comment.)

Broce, the Emmy-winning former head of marketing at ESPN and MTV and now director of his own agency, is full of stories like that—the natural outcome of a frenzied project like “Brotherhood of Man.” The commercial, a lavish musical set to an earworm from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, is absolutely stuffed with talent from the 2011–2012 TV season, representing everything from Emmy-winning juggernauts (30 Rock, Saturday Night Live) and gems beloved now but often overlooked during their original runs (The Office, Parks and Recreation, Community) to ambitious but flawed moon shots (Smash) and the law of Harry (Harry’s Law). Not to mention the muscle behind the camera: The ad was directed, believe it or not, by a pre-Thor Taika Waititi, then best known for helming the 2010 Sundance favorite Boy. (“I’ll just be honest with you,” says Broce. “I didn’t know who he was.”)

But “Brotherhood of Man” also became a victim of its own success. Originally, Broce intended the spot to highlight only NBC’s comedies. But when the network brass saw a rousing early cut, “Everybody got excited. Everybody was like, ‘Holy shit. This could be really great.’ But the bad thing was that it was like, ‘Okay, we got to put more people into this.’” Soon, Broce was scrambling to squeeze in as much NBC talent as physically possible.

“It became like, oh, God, really? It was the guy from Grimm, and Howie [Mandel] to represent [America’s Got Talent]”—and Donald Trump, then still the host of The Apprentice. And Matt Lauer, Chris D’Elia, and CeeLo Green, all of whom have, like Trump, been accused of sexual misconduct in the years since the commercial first aired. (All have denied wrongdoing as well.)

“There’s been several stages of grief with that,” sighs Broce, referring to the various ways his labor of love has aged poorly. There’s the #MeToo aspect. There’s the ickiness of watching Lauer pal around with Ann Curry, the Today show cohost Lauer was allegedly pushing out of her job even as he smiled on camera next to her. (Lauer has accused Curry of having “personal and professional animosity” toward him.)

Worst of all is the general stink of Trump, who by 2012 had already become a divisive figure thanks to his embrace of the racist “birther” movement. At least Broce can say he was on the right side of history. “It was important to me that Donald Trump never appear in this thing,” he says. “I couldn’t stand him. It’s like, ‘No, Donald Trump is not in the brotherhood of man.’”

Unfortunately, Broce was overruled—which meant trying to find a non-awkward way to shoehorn the future president into an already busy commercial. “Originally, my solve on Trump was to have him appear at the end next to Darrell Hammond,” who was then Saturday Night Live’s resident Trump impersonator. But Trump refused to appear in the ad’s big group ending—“him with other people was a nonstarter”—which meant finding a place for a solo shot. Even that wasn’t enough for Trump. “He feels pissed that he is an afterthought to this thing,” remembers Broce. “We shot it upstairs at the Today show. So he was pissed. He was like, ‘Why didn’t you put me with Miss Universe?’” (Trump hasn’t yet responded to a request for comment.)

Trump wasn’t exactly alone, either. Broce remembers the concept of the ad drawing ire from a good portion of the talent roped into it, even beyond the famously cantankerous Chevy Chase.

“I thought when the idea was sold, everybody bought in creatively,” he says. That didn’t happen. Various showrunners didn’t love being told they had to accommodate a film crew during a busy production period, just weeks before the ad was set to air. (The Smash sequence was originally much more elaborate; “they were like, ‘We absolutely do not have the time to do anything close to this,’” says Broce.) A few also weren’t impressed by some of the original script’s admittedly hacky jokes, like having Tonight show heir apparent Jimmy Fallon end the spot by winking at the camera. When resistance began bubbling up, “It gave some people the opportunity to be like, ‘Fuck this. I’m not doing this,’” says Broce.

Broce’s idea was initially sparked by 30 Rock: He’d been trying to come up with a beer commercial set to “Brotherhood of Man” when he realized how much the song sounded like a conversation between Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy and Tina Fey’s Liz Lemon. But Broce says Baldwin left early while filming the first of the ad’s two 30 Rock–set scenes, leaving Waititi with a dearth of usable footage. (“You’ll notice that Tina keeps wiping nacho cheese off her face, which we had to keep because we only had one or two workable takes,” says Broce.) The Office’s Leslie David Baker didn’t appear on the day of shooting at all. The cast of The Voice—which then comprised Blake Shelton, Adam Levine, CeeLo Green, and Christina Aguilera—did, but only after refusing to sing for the musical ad: “They didn’t like the song,” Broce remembers being told. “They don’t want to sing. They’re busy. They hate this.”

Fallon, Broce says, “was the most resistant overall. He never was really on board.” Eventually, the then host of Late Night came up with his own idea in which he’d end the ad by tap dancing, “but the sequence was taking forever. Taika being Taika, he was able to sort of smooth it over with Jimmy and make it work—but that was probably the one thing in the cut where you can really see someone who was not into the idea.” (Nobody mentioned in this paragraph and the one above has responded to requests for comment, with the exception of Baldwin; when contacted, a rep for the actor replied, “I don’t know what you are talking about.”)

That air of opposition doesn’t really come through in the finished ad, probably because other members of the NBC family were on board—eventually. Fey, says Broce, was enormously helpful. After having her writers punch up the original script, she was an anchoring presence on set: “Grizz’s [Chapman] or Dotcom’s [Kevin Brown] cell phone went off during one of the takes, and she was like a general: ‘Not cool! Phones off!’” says Broce. “She was really cool throughout the whole thing, despite having like 6,000 other things going on.”

Broce says Ed Helms, the big soloist from The Office sequence, was a champ, as were Rainn Wilson and Zach Woods. Most of the folks from Community, a show that was perpetually on the bubble for cancellation, were thrilled to be highlighted in a Super Bowl commercial. Kathy Bates, who had to be green-screened into the big finish, “couldn’t have been nicer.”

The final group shot at Rockefeller Center, featuring Fey, Baldwin, the Rockettes, the cast of SNL, and various familiar faces from NBC News (including Brian Williams, years before his own scandal), was filmed just four days before the big game. “My God, I aged 10 years on that shoot,” says Broce. “I was a wreck by the time it ended.” The ad, which Broce initially told NBC could probably be produced for around $400,000, wound up costing somewhere north of $1 million.

It all seemed worthwhile when “Brotherhood of Man” premiered—and both the network and the ad trade press loved it. “It was really well received,” says Broce, as living proof that NBC’s roster of talent was tough to beat—regardless of the network’s ratings struggles. If anything, much of the spot feels more resonant now than it did in 2012. “A ton more people have seen the big four comedies now versus when they came out,” Broce rightly points out. “The Office is loads more popular now. Same for Parks and Rec. And it feels like the cool, smart kids have finally come around to 30 Rock.”

That love is apparent on YouTube, where comments on the ad veer more toward nostalgia for the era it represents than censure of the disgraced men who mar it. Broce is tickled to see people still talking about “Brotherhood of Man” 10 years on, and to see that the conversation about it is largely positive. It’s something that could only have been produced by and for network television: “I don’t see Netflix doing it”—at least not with all its stars appearing in the same room. “They don’t even have flagship shows.”

“A lot of comments you see on YouTube are ‘I loved this until 3:03!’” he adds. “Or, ‘This was great, until the orange guy ruins it.’”

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