Plots rewritten to promote cars
A Toyota Highlander Hybrid had a featured role in one of the fall's new TV shows recently, and its appearance so irritated a friend of mine that she immediately changed the channel and now swears she will never watch the show again.
"Related" runs on one of those U.S. mini-networks that work the nether regions of the cable channel universe, so you may not even have heard of it, let alone the show. You're not alone in your ignorance, however, since official TV-watching figures suggest that about 99.5 percent of the continent has so far resisted Related's charms.
The show follows the lives of four young women who've gone from living above the family deli in the Bronx to a Sex and the City existence in Manhattan, with more than their share of angst to keep them striking various poses at each other. You won't be surprised to hear that Related is intended to appeal to young women, and is apparently succeeding in a modest way.
My friend quite liked the show, until about the fifth or sixth episode when the Toyota Highlander Hybrid showed up quite unexpectedly. According to my friend, before the SUV's appearance halfway through the one-hour show, the only automotive references she recalls hearing involved cabs, such as how dirty they were and how hard they are to get when you need one, and so on.
But then the husband of the oldest sister started going on about how much he wanted a Toyota Highlander Hybrid. My friend was surprised at that, and then relieved when the woman made the easy case against owning a car in Manhattan (primarily, where do you park it and how can you rationalize paying for that parking?) and they moved on to someone else's weekly crisis. But then the Highlander returned, with drooling from husband and wife over its style and leather and so on. When one turned up on the street outside their apartment (sitting right at their door, to add insult to injury) because the wife bought it to show her love for her husband or something like that, my friend's irritation level reached critical mass and she tuned Related out for good.
This lady is as media savvy as anyone, and she figured that she had just witnessed product placement moving to a whole new and dangerous level. Rather than simply paying to have their products turn up as background in a TV show or movie, which has been going on forever, companies are now offering more to have their products play a more active role, in the TV industry likes to call a "product cameo". So Toyota pays the producers of Related and they work out a plot device that has two of the primary characters lust after a Highlander Hybrid.
As it happens, I don't know if Toyota paid for this appearance, or if the producers of Related were simply adding their own small voice to the misplaced LA effort to get everyone to drive hybrids, or what. And it doesn't really matter, since my friend thinks she saw a product placement that affected the content of the show, and it upset her tremendously.
I know how she feels, since one of my favorite shows featured something even more egregious recently and it was not pretty. That would be Medium, an hour-long drama about a young mother who uses her visions to help a district attorney in Phoenix put murderers and such in jail. The unofficial catchphrase of Medium is "I depose dead people."
In this particular episode, the medium and her husband decided to go to a preview screening of Memoirs of a Geisha, which is an actual movie coming soon to theatres near you. It could have been an effort to make the pair look more sophisticated (or so I told myself), but it turned out to be anything but. They went to the theatre where he ran into an old girlfriend to set up the side-plot of that week's drama, and the scene ended, to reveal..... a real-life commercial for the movie. Ewww, ewww, ewww.
A Toyota Highlander Hybrid had a featured role in one of the fall's new TV shows recently, and its appearance so irritated a friend of mine that she immediately changed the channel and now swears she will never watch the show again.
"Related" runs on one of those U.S. mini-networks that work the nether regions of the cable channel universe, so you may not even have heard of it, let alone the show. You're not alone in your ignorance, however, since official TV-watching figures suggest that about 99.5 percent of the continent has so far resisted Related's charms.
The show follows the lives of four young women who've gone from living above the family deli in the Bronx to a Sex and the City existence in Manhattan, with more than their share of angst to keep them striking various poses at each other. You won't be surprised to hear that Related is intended to appeal to young women, and is apparently succeeding in a modest way.
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| Toyota Highlander Hybrid |
But then the husband of the oldest sister started going on about how much he wanted a Toyota Highlander Hybrid. My friend was surprised at that, and then relieved when the woman made the easy case against owning a car in Manhattan (primarily, where do you park it and how can you rationalize paying for that parking?) and they moved on to someone else's weekly crisis. But then the Highlander returned, with drooling from husband and wife over its style and leather and so on. When one turned up on the street outside their apartment (sitting right at their door, to add insult to injury) because the wife bought it to show her love for her husband or something like that, my friend's irritation level reached critical mass and she tuned Related out for good.
This lady is as media savvy as anyone, and she figured that she had just witnessed product placement moving to a whole new and dangerous level. Rather than simply paying to have their products turn up as background in a TV show or movie, which has been going on forever, companies are now offering more to have their products play a more active role, in the TV industry likes to call a "product cameo". So Toyota pays the producers of Related and they work out a plot device that has two of the primary characters lust after a Highlander Hybrid.
As it happens, I don't know if Toyota paid for this appearance, or if the producers of Related were simply adding their own small voice to the misplaced LA effort to get everyone to drive hybrids, or what. And it doesn't really matter, since my friend thinks she saw a product placement that affected the content of the show, and it upset her tremendously.
I know how she feels, since one of my favorite shows featured something even more egregious recently and it was not pretty. That would be Medium, an hour-long drama about a young mother who uses her visions to help a district attorney in Phoenix put murderers and such in jail. The unofficial catchphrase of Medium is "I depose dead people."
In this particular episode, the medium and her husband decided to go to a preview screening of Memoirs of a Geisha, which is an actual movie coming soon to theatres near you. It could have been an effort to make the pair look more sophisticated (or so I told myself), but it turned out to be anything but. They went to the theatre where he ran into an old girlfriend to set up the side-plot of that week's drama, and the scene ended, to reveal..... a real-life commercial for the movie. Ewww, ewww, ewww.