Playoff Commercials Have Eaten My Soul

There Can Only Be One: When they came out, I was all about these guys. I thought they were elegant, intense, and articulate. I have also never had such an acute sense of how wildly ear placement on the human skull varies. But somewhere between an inevitably atrocious Adam Sandler movie, and Chris Paul talking about undiscussed playoff fears despite being amidst his first post-season sojourn, I got off the boat. These would have been great if they had taken the time to tailor the text a little more specifically to each teams’ unique psychology/history, or even if they had just evolved as the playoffs went on. But the repetition of the same monologues just made me feel uncomfortable, as if all my love and attention is being bastardized by a bunch of jersey-popping millionaires who disseminate myths about “dreams that never die” when really they’re just reading from the script. I have nightmares. Kobe nightmares. If NBA players are sleeping soundly at night but my dreams are haunted by the Black Mamba, that’s not ok.

Tyler Perry’s House of Payne: Ok, which one is Tyler Perry? Is he the fat guy? I know Perry is the guy at the end of the commercial smiling in front of the show’s logo, but is he actually in the show. Is the fat guy Perry in a fat suit? Can’t be. He’s too short. Although they did get John Leguizamo to look about 4’9” and weigh 350 pounds in Spawn, so you never know. But more importantly, why do TBS and TNT even produce original material? No one will ever watch this show, although I would watch a thousand episodes of Tyler Perry rather than even once gaze upon that other middle class show about the white people. I don’t remember the name of it, but you know the one.

McDonald’s Chicken Sandwich: Two very serious questions come to my mind during that McDonald’s chicken sandwich commercial. First, why is McD’s trying to appeal to hipsters? And second, are hipsters actually watching the NBA playoffs? I know somewhere in Greenpoint there’s a kid with a turquoise head band and some Nike Dunks who reads FreeDarko and has heard of Toni Kukoc so he thinks he’s the shit, but is this really the programming that reaches that demographic. My fear is that somewhere between Vlade Divac smoking cigarettes and Josh Howard smoking weed, this league actually got cool. I mean, it was always and will forever be cool in the way that listening to P-Funk and getting on fire in NBA Jam are cool. But now I’m worried it’s going to become listening to Mission of Burma/smoking P-funks cool. And that ain’t cool. I’m just overreacting right? I do have a tendency to do that.

And no offense to FreeDarko, Nike Dunks, or Toni Kukoc. Or head bands for that matter. Or Mission of Burma. All of those independently are very cool. But so is Joy Division and look what hipsters did to them.