Monday, January 23, 2006

DENIED WITH PREJUDICE: Spacewoman and I are thoroughly confused by the Elfcentric campaign for Courting Alex. The 30-second spots, billboards, full-page Variety inserts, pop-unders, street-lamp banners, guerilla flash-mob placements, and nanoimplant subliminal messages all tell us that this is "a new Jennaration of comedy!" Really? Isn't it just a slightly older Jennaration than the one that had a bad show a few years back? And isn't the underlying assumption of the campaign -- that the American public has been clamoring for Jenna Elfman's return -- completely off-target? The whole campaign smacks of the kind of self-delusion that caused the third-cutest girl in your high school class to move to L.A. to become an actress, only to return seven weeks later with $6500 in credit card debt and a membership card in the grocer's union. In fact, it's the same strategy that has failed recently with Heather Graham, Rob Lowe, and 3/4 of the Seinfeld troupe.

To me, the only way a campaign like that works is if the subject is in an elite class of beloved personalities. Of unemployed (or soon-to-be unemployed) TV-associated actors, I can think of only four with the requisite good will to actually be the campaign: Aniston, Garner (maybe), Romano, and Seinfeld. Am I missing anybody?

No comments:

Post a Comment