I Like to Watch

by Emily Nussbaum

  I want to talk to Tina Fey about that joke, but her management won’t set up an interview. So I ask her co-writer Robert Carlock, via email, how he responds to criticism that they’re having their cake and eating it, too. “In our thirty-six episodes, we’ve done product placement only three times,” Carlock writes. Though they regularly make pop-culture jokes, “the vast majority of our references are actually creative decisions with no quid pro quo.”

  When there is quid pro quo, he adds, “in TV the head writers are also producers. If we are having and/or eating any cake, it’s only because we are succeeding in serving both the creative and the financial. And isn’t that what TV is all about?” Fortunately, “some companies are willing to pay to be part of the joke.”

  The email ends, “If you mention Papa John’s Pizza in this article, I get $40. I’ll give you $10.”

  A few weeks later, Fey gives a quote to Entertainment Weekly clarifying her show’s philosophy. “We called [our deal] out really hard to let people know. If it’s a commercial, you’re going to know it’s a commercial.”

  But that’s simply not true. The three integrations I know of on 30 Rock are Snapple, Verizon, and SoyJoy. I didn’t realize SoyJoy was an integration, though—I assumed it was a joke, like Sabor de Soledad, Liz Lemon’s favorite snack. Then a few weeks later, I saw a SoyJoy tank top in Us Weekly. I googled it, and sure enough: “SoyJoy. Fortified with optimism!”

  I call Lisa Herdman, the national television buyer at RPA, the advertising agency that handles the SoyJoy account. She’s piqued that I’d mistaken SoyJoy for a fake product. “Do you watch television?” she asks. “We’ve run our spots everywhere that any female eighteen to forty-nine would watch!”

  The SoyJoy integration was part of a larger media buy, she explains, linked with NBC’s Green Week. SoyJoy produced 40-second “green tips.” It sponsored Bravo’s Top Chef. And on 30 Rock, since the script for the episode in question—which centered on a fictional reality series called MILF Island—was already written, the writers inserted SoyJoy into a B-plot, in which Liz Lemon’s co-writer Pete gets his arm stuck in a vending machine. The brand was also the fictional sponsor of MILF Island. At one point, we hear its slogan in the background, contrasting with Pete’s state of despair. “That was the week ‘fortified with optimism’ was locked and loaded for us,” Herdman tells me. “And we encouraged them to get that on there somehow.”

  But Herdman was most enthusiastic about SoyJoy’s next appearance, on The Closer, where the heroine, Brenda, is trying to develop healthier eating habits. “She reaches into her purse, offers it to her friend, and he says, ‘No, thank you.’ ”

  Does Brenda’s friend make fun of the product? “Oh, no, no, no, no,” Herdman says—on The Closer, SoyJoy hoped for more control. “The people at The Closer saw the 30 Rock episode, and their first attempt at an integration was that Brenda goes to a vending machine. And honestly? You can’t get SoyJoy out of a vending machine. There’s something about the weight of the product. We allowed 30 Rock to do that, but now we don’t want people to think they can go to vending machines to get SoyJoy.” Her voice is serious. “You know, we’re adamant that they don’t use the word ‘bar.’ Because it’s not a bar. When they presented the idea that Brenda was to taste it and offer it, I was like, as long as he doesn’t say, ‘Ew, gross.’ We’re targeting females, so for a male to decline is not a horrible thing, although we’d love for everyone to eat it.”

  It occurs to me that the 30 Rock integration was a failed experiment. After all, the product looked to me (a woman eighteen to forty-nine!) like a punch line. The Pete B plot was the weakest element of an otherwise funny episode—and worse, a male character reached for the SoyJoy.

  “Yeah, honestly, I had my own idea of exactly how I wanted it,” Herdman tells me. “My initial thought was, Let’s get it to Liz Lemon. There’s a study somewhere that says soy is beneficial to menopausal women. So I had written it up that—who’s the page? Kenneth. That Kenneth was handing it to Liz Lemon, saying, ‘Ooh, someone might need some soy.’ But they’re not going to take what I say. It’s Tina Fey. And she’s brilliant.”

  * * *

  —

  Keith Powell plays a minor character on 30 Rock, Toofer, the uptight black writer from Harvard (he’s a “two-fer”). He admires Tina Fey for her ability to alchemize her experiences, he tells me. “I think that’s what Tina’s relationship really is, figuring out how to exist as an artist in the corporate world. NBC gives notes. And Tina, instead of fighting it or giving in to it, Tina uses it.”

  But although he loved the Verizon bit, Powell does mention one experience that troubled him. “American Express paid us a tremendous amount to do spots during the commercial breaks. Little mini storylines to stop people from DVRing through. And at some point, some of the cast members started saying, ‘Are we doing a commercial or are we filming 30 Rock?’ ”

  Powell sounds conflicted as he speaks about these ads, the “interstitials.” (The industry also calls them “podbusters.”) Using the show’s characters in ads was ingenious, he says. But Powell, who has done successful commercials, knows they generally pay a noncompete clause, to ensure actors can’t pitch a competing product. The cast members discussed the lack of compensation, but nobody seems to have complained. He circles back: “I do want to make it clear that I think we need product integration. If Verizon didn’t pay us to say ‘Give us the money,’ we wouldn’t be on the air. They’ve created an environment where they can show any product and people find it funny. I’m glad it’s my show that figured this out!”

  Comic Judah Friedlander also plays a writer on 30 Rock. He, too, wasn’t sure what the deal was with those interstitials. Sometimes, he says, “there’s integration going on and I don’t even know it. Maybe if you’re a huge star, you can say no. Where I’m at, you pretty much do it if they tell you.”

  A few days later, I find myself gazing at an American Express magazine ad featuring Tina Fey. The image is hypnotically appealing. In it, Fey sits on the floor of her messy office, with her adorable toddler, looking smart and intense. Like Apple, like Ben & Jerry’s, like 30 Rock, Tina Fey is herself a brand that women eighteen to forty-nine might find seductive. She’s the working mom (who plays an iconic single woman), the girl nerd with power, capable of getting chick-centric comedies green-lighted in this Apatow age. She zapped Aaron Sorkin; she zinged Sarah Palin. Bitch is the new black.

  If Tina Fey thinks it’s okay, who am I to disagree?

  * * *

  —

  Then something interesting crops up on the Internet, a different type of experiment. It’s by Joss Whedon, creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I’d last seen Whedon on the set of Firefly, a Fox space Western about a group of rebels fleeing a corporation that governs their universe. The series premiered in 2002, in retrospect the year everything changed. Joe Millionaire was about to become a monster hit. DVRs were new; DVDs were a big deal; online TV hadn’t happened yet, but it was on the horizon. Aired out of order, Firefly was canceled after eleven episodes despite a fanatical online following. Yet it was a surprise hit on DVD, enabling Whedon to make a movie. Serenity won raves but flopped at the box office. So it goes.

  Whedon is about to launch Dollhouse, a new series on Fox. But in the interim, he’s whipped up a pet project, a labor of love that is also a stab at a new kind of TV economics—and a response to the paralysis he witnessed during the writers’ strike. It’s a musical called Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, forty-two minutes long, filmed in six days, starring Neil Patrick Harris as Billy, an anarchist nerd who dreams of being a supervillain. Quirky and hilarious, it streamed free for a week online (crashing the server the first night). Then it went onto iTunes, debuting at No. 1. A DVD launches this fall. A tech blogger ran the numbers and concluded Whedon might make real money. This could “signal the beginning of the end of television as the medium of the least common denomin
ator and the beginning of the profitable niche market,” the blogger wrote, applauding a “freemium model” enabling cult creators to get funding directly from their audience.

  I ask Whedon about 30 Rock. Like Fontana, he’s a fan. He thought the Verizon joke was fantastic. But he adds a caveat: You can only do that joke once. “You can’t do it again and be cute, because then it’s a different type of shilling. Eventually you realize the reason they’re making a joke is because there’s something abhorrent going on.”

  I tell him about the SoyJoy deal. He’s troubled; he hadn’t realized that was an integration. (He also hadn’t realized it was a real brand.) But it’s the American Express podbusters that really set him off. “My wife and I get very angry. We invest in the reality of the show! And this is one of the ways they’re picking apart the idea of the narrative, keeping you from knowing if it’s a show or not.”

  It’s not just one series or one network, he points out. Everybody does it, and the strike added almost nothing to his colleagues’ ability, or willingness, to push back, not merely against integration but against the way storytelling itself has been corroded—by required “webisodes,” the insistence that writers blog every impulse, even the erosion of the end credits. “They want to take the story apart so they can stuff it with as much revenue as they can. And ultimately what you get is a zombie, a stuffed thing—a non-show.”

  Asked to use a particular phone, Whedon might say yes. “If we need to talk about the wonder of that phone? I don’t know.” Television is a mass art, requiring compromise, pragmatism, he knows—but the line creators draw should not be about “How coolly can I do this? The most artful can be the most unethical.”

  LIZ: So, we wrote a product integration sketch.

  JACK: Good.

  LIZ: But we wanted to run it by you first, because it’s about how GE is making us do this, and we were kind of hoping that the GE executive in the sketch could be played by you.

  JACK: Oh, I get it. The whole self-referential thing: Letterman hates the suits, Stern yells at his boss, Nixon’s “Sock it to me” on Laugh-In. Yeah, hippie humor.

  Which is more naive: Whedon’s belief in the radical power of storytelling—or the notion that every integration is acceptable, as long as the suits and the creatives stay friendly?

  Could Whedon’s experiment really suggest an alternative to the Branded Universe? I want to believe in that possibility. But I know there’s another future, and it’s by far the more likely one, especially now that the economy has crumbled for real. In this version, that creative riddle that stumped Dick Blasucci on MADtv has been solved. It is indeed possible to create subversive comedy that also sells Yarises. On most TV series, brands are woven indiscernibly into each plot twist—while on others they are referenced openly, with tremendous finesse, because there’s no longer any distinction between what’s funny and what moves the needle. Characters are designed as shills or consumers from day one. Shows themselves are brands, actors are brands, and so are songs and sodas, and these entities link and detach with the elegance of acrobats. No one will see a distinction between a scriptwriter and a copywriter—least of all an audience member—because that frog has boiled beyond recognition.

  Welcome to the new Golden Age, fortified with optimism.

  IN LIVING COLOR

  With Black-ish, Kenya Barris Rethinks the Family Sitcom

  The New Yorker, April 25, 2016

  I set up this profile via Direct Message on Twitter, never contacting ABC. Kenya Barris was a terrific interviewee, game even during the tricky fact-checking process, when we had to talk to his parents about the violence in his childhood. The one detail that I’m sad I had to cut for space was the running bet Barris had with his writers that Trump would win the nomination and then the general election. He wasn’t thrilled to be so prescient.

  Kenya Barris, the creator of the ABC family sitcom black-ish, slumped on a sofa in his airy home, in Encino, California, his eyelids drooping with fatigue. In the nearby media room, his two young sons, Beau and Kass, played Minecraft on an Xbox. In the kitchen, his wife, Rainbow, who was pregnant with their sixth child, made popcorn. Out in the hall, their three daughters—aged ten, fourteen, and sixteen—yakked and giggled. The family was getting ready to watch the West Coast airing of “Hope,” an episode about police racism that, at varying times, Barris had described to me as both “the one that ruins me” and “maybe my most important episode.” Once, with a resigned shrug, he had said, “Well, the toothpaste is out of the tube.”

  Like most breakthrough sitcoms, black-ish is built on autobiography. It’s narrated by Andre “Dre” Johnson, a black ad executive played by Anthony Anderson, who has jumped, as Barris did, from inner-city poverty to bourgeois wealth, only to find himself flummoxed by his brood of privileged, Obama-era kids. Tracee Ellis Ross plays his wife, who, like the real Rainbow, is a biracial anesthesiologist nicknamed Bow. With a joke velocity approaching that of 30 Rock, the show, brassy and shrewd, stands out for its rare directness about race and class. As Barris likes to put it, whereas The Cosby Show was about a family that happened to be black, black-ish is about a black family.

  In its first two seasons, the show scored laughs from such subjects as whether black parents spank more and how different generations use the N-word; there was a plot about the knowing nod of recognition black men give one another. One hilariously nervy script satirized Martin Luther King Day. (Andre, Jr., admits that he’s never read King’s speech, explaining, “I always kind of zone out when people start to tell me about their dreams.”) Some viewers, especially black ones, have been put off by the show’s title, with its cheeky implication that some people are less black than others. But Barris told me that he was glad he’d resisted ABC’s suggestions to sanitize it, titling it The Johnsons—or, absurdly, Urban Family. Michelle Obama has called black-ish her favorite television show.

  Until “Hope,” however, the show hadn’t tangled with real-world politics. During Season 1, in 2014, Barris pitched a story based on the arrest of the African American professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for breaking into his own home. At the time, the Ferguson riots were streaming live on the Internet; ABC asked him not to do any jokes about cops. By 2015, the national outcry about police brutality had become too loud to ignore—and black-ish was getting raves as part of a newly diverse TV landscape. Over the December holidays, Barris holed up in the studio attached to his home, bingeing on Red Bull and “probably some Adderall,” and hammered out “Hope.”

  The episode opened with Marvin Gaye’s “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler)” and a scene borrowed from Barris’s life: Beau, watching the Ferguson riots on television, had asked his parents, “Why are these people so mad?” What followed was a classic TV “bottle episode,” set in one location: In their living room, the family debated the acquittal of a cop who’d repeatedly Tasered an unarmed black man. Their arguments were punctuated by jokes about Dre’s father having been a member of something called the Black Bobcats. (“We were Panther-adjacent.”) The episode felt haunted—and was made more vital and angrier—by the killing of twelve-year-old Tamir Rice in Cleveland. While Barris was struggling with the script, the Ohio prosecutor announced that a grand jury would not indict the cops who shot Rice. Barris still gets distressed talking about the case. “You know, twelve is young,” he said, his voice cracking. “That’s somebody’s baby still.”

  Eight-year-old Beau, who was wearing pajamas printed with pine trees, hopped onto his father’s lap. While another ABC sitcom, Modern Family, played on the TV, interspersed with promos for “Hope,” Beau held his father’s iPhone, watching a nature video about predators.

  “It escaped!” Beau called out, looking up at his dad excitedly. “Mouse can swim?”

  “What?” Barris said, confused. Forty-one years old, he has amused, hooded eyes and pockmarked cheeks. Blue-green tattoos peek out from his collar.

/>   “Mouse can swim?”

  “No, mice can’t swim—they can, like, paddle,” Barris said, laughing.

  In the video, a mouse was in a river, being tormented by a fish. “That’s mean, now,” Barris said. “That’s sadistic.”

  “Why are they mean?” Beau asked.

  “Guys do that sometimes. It’s a bad way to be.”

  “It’s gonna escape. Look!” Beau said.

  “It didn’t escape,” Barris said gently. But Beau kept seeing something different.

  “Yes,” he insisted. “It did.”

  The exchange felt peculiarly congruent with the episode we were about to watch: a meditation on just how much black parents should protect their children’s innocence about the American justice system. Barris, who had been thrown against cars by cops and seen friends choked during arrests, had devoured Ta-Nehisi Coates’s book Between the World and Me, an anguished manifesto addressed to Coates’s son; the book was both quoted and displayed in the episode. (Barris asked Coates to do a cameo, but Coates declined.) The show’s climax came when Dre begged Bow to remember how thrilling it had felt to watch the Obamas walk into the White House for the first time—and how terrified they were that the first couple would be assassinated. “Tell me you weren’t worried that someone was gonna snatch that hope away from us, like they always do,” Dre said. Silent footage was spliced into the scene: the Obamas, smiling, youthful, a model American family.