Are Commercials the New Nepo-Baby Launch Pad?
Like any modern misanthrope, I have a severe distaste for both celebrity culture and rampant advertising. I don’t ramble on in public about how much both are destroying modern society, because I don’t want to be pantsed and ridiculed by zoomers, but that doesn’t mean I don’t believe it. We’re sent through carefully calculated micro-traumas every seven to eight minutes in order to make a new kind of pizza crust seem like an emotional solution, and then we’re like, “People’s mental health seems bad.” Throw a celebrity in to bite into whatever new burger is out (they’re just like us), and I’m ready to go raise goats somewhere.
Recently, though, I’ve started to notice a new genre of advertisement. The advertisement that allows a celebrity to gently display their telegenic kin to us. I can’t imagine this was a key part of the pitch, so I’m left to think that celebrities are starting to add stipulations to commercial contracts that they can be used to incubate our celebrities of the future. As if they can’t already brute-force their way into supporting roles and be given seven to ten strikes to learn how to act on the fly, now I’m getting soft-launched on somebody’s kid in the middle of a toothpaste ad.
That, or it’s just some clever way to double-dip on a contract, or a way of getting Gillette to subsidize your rich kid’s allowance. My brain is already involuntarily trying to decipher the meaningless mishmash of celebrities in most commercials. Why are JD and Turk from Scrubs singing with John Travolta? I know it’s a song from Grease, but why? Now, in addition to that, I have to try to figure out if I’m supposed to recognize Jamie Foxx’s kid from something, or why they want her stating a fake preference for Intel processors?
Free me from feeling like I’m sitting at the world’s most awkward dinner-table conversation. If you want me to learn your kid’s name, you’re going to have to do it the old fashioned way: by threatening to leave your talent agency unless they put them in a bad sci-fi movie. And if you’re going to come at me with the “Leave their kids out of this!” defense, well, leaving their kids out of this is all I’m asking for.