Ever since the finale of “Mad Men,” I’ve been meditating on its audacious last image. Don Draper, sitting cross-legged and purring “Ommmm,” is achieving inner peace at an Esalen-like retreat. He’s as handsome as ever, in khakis and a crisp white shirt. A bell rings, and a grin widens across his face. Then, as if cutting to a sponsor, we move to the iconic Coke ad from 1971—a green hillside covered with a racially diverse chorus of young people, trilling, in harmony, “I’d like to teach the world to sing.” Don Draper, recently suicidal, has invented the world’s greatest ad. He’s back, baby.
The scene triggered a debate online. From one perspective, the image looked cynical: the viewer is tricked into thinking that Draper has achieved Nirvana, only to be slapped with the source of his smile. It’s the grin of an adman who has figured out how to use enlightenment to peddle sugar water, co-opting the counterculture as a brand. Yet, from another angle, the scene looked idealistic. Draper has indeed had a spiritual revelation, one that he’s expressing in a beautiful way—through advertising, his great gift. The night the episode aired, it struck me as a dark joke. But, at a discussion a couple of days later, at the New York Public Library, Matthew Weiner, the show’s creator, told the novelist A. M. Homes that viewers should see the hilltop ad as “very pure,” the product of “an enlightened state.” To regard it otherwise, he warned, was itself the symptom of a poisonous mind-set.
The question of how television fits together with advertising—and whether we should resist that relationship or embrace it—has haunted the medium since its origins. Advertising is TV’s original sin. When people called TV shows garbage, which they did all the time, until recently, commercialism was at the heart of the complaint. Even great TV could never be good art, because it was tainted by definition. It was there to sell.
That was the argument made by George W. S. Trow in this magazine, in a feverish manifesto called “Within the Context of No Context.” * That essay, which ran in 1980, became a sensation, as coruscating denunciations of modernity so often do. In television, “the trivial is raised up to power,” Trow wrote. “The powerful is lowered toward the trivial.” Driven by “demography”—that is, by the corrupting force of money and ratings—television treats those who consume it like sales targets, encouraging them to view themselves that way. In one of several sections titled “Celebrities,” he writes, “The most successful celebrities are products. Consider the real role in American life of Coca-Cola. Is any man as well-loved as this soft drink is?”
Much of Trow’s essay, which runs to more than a hundred pages, makes little sense. It is written in the style of oracular poetry, full of elegant repetitions, elegant repetitions that induce a hypnotic effect, elegant repetitions that suggest authority through their wonderful numbing rhythms, but which contain few facts. It’s élitism in the guise of hipness. It is more nostalgic than “Mad Men” ever was for the era when Wasp men in hats ran New York. It’s a screed against TV written at the medium’s low point—after the energy of the sitcoms of the seventies had faded but before the innovations of the nineties—and it paints TV fans as brainwashed dummies.
And yet there’s something in Trow’s manifesto that I find myself craving these days: that rude resistance to being sold to, the insistence that there is, after all, such a thing as selling out. Those of us who love TV have won the war. The best scripted shows are regarded as significant art—debated, revered, denounced. TV showrunners are embraced as heroes and role models, even philosophers. At the same time, television’s business model is in chaos, splintered and re-forming itself, struggling with its own history. Making television has always meant bending to the money—and TV history has taught us to be cool with any compromise. But sometimes we’re knowing about things that we don’t know much about at all.
Once upon a time, TV made sense, economically and structurally: a few dominant network shows ran weekly, with ads breaking them up, like choruses between verses. Then came pay cable, the VCR, the DVD, the DVR, and the Internet. At this point, the model seems to morph every six months. Oceanic flat screens give way to palm-size iPhones. A cheap writer-dominated medium absorbs pricey Hollywood directors. You can steal TV; you can buy TV; you can get it free. Netflix, a distributor, becomes a producer. On Amazon, customers vote for which pilots will survive. Shows cancelled by NBC jump to Yahoo, which used to be a failing search engine. The two most ambitious and original début series this summer came not from HBO or AMC but from a pair of lightweight cable networks whose slogans might as well be “Please underestimate us”: Lifetime, with “UnREAL,” and USA Network, with “Mr. Robot.” That there is a summer season at all is a new phenomenon. This fall, as the networks launch a bland slate of pilots, we know there are better options.
A couple of months ago, at a meeting of the Television Critics Association, the C.E.O. of FX, John Landgraf, delivered a speech about “peak TV,” in which he lamented the exponential rise in production: three hundred and seventy-one scripted shows last year, more than four hundred expected this year—a bubble, Landgraf said, that would surely deflate. He got some pushback: Why now, when the door had cracked open to more than white-guy antiheroes, was it “too much” for viewers? But just as worrisome was the second part of Landgraf’s speech, in which he wondered how the industry could fund so much TV. What was the model, now that the pie had been sliced into slivers? When Landgraf took his job, in 2005, ad buys made up more than fifty per cent of FX’s revenue, he said. Now that figure was thirty-two per cent. When ratings drop, ad rates drop, too, and when people fast-forward producers look for new forms of access: through apps, through data mining, through deals that shape the shows we see, both visibly and invisibly. Some of this involves the ancient art of product integration, by which sponsors buy the right to be part of the story: these are the ads that can’t be fast-forwarded.
This is both a new crisis and an old one. When television began, it was a live medium. Replicating radio, it was not merely supported by admen; it was run by them. In TV’s early years, there were no showrunners: the person with ultimate authority was the product representative, the guy from Lysol or Lucky Strike. Beneath that man (always a man) was a network exec. A layer down were writers, who were fungible, nameless figures, with the exception of people like Paddy Chayefsky, machers who often retreated when they grew frustrated by the industry’s censorious limits. The result was that TV writers developed a complex mix of pride and shame, a sense that they were hired hands, not artists. It was a working-class model of creativity. The shows might be funny or beautiful, but their creators would never own them.
Advertisements shaped everything about early television programs, including their length and structure, with clear acts to provide logical inlets for ads to appear. Initially, there were rules governing how many ads could run: the industry standard was six minutes per hour. (Today, on network, it’s about fourteen minutes.) But this didn’t include the vast amounts of product integration that were folded into the scripts. (Product placement, which involves props, was a given.) Viewers take for granted that this is native to the medium, but it’s unique to the U.S.; in the United Kingdom, such deals were prohibited until 2011. Even then, they were barred from the BBC, banned for alcohol and junk food, and required to be visibly declared—a “P” must appear onscreen.
In “Brought to You By: Postwar Television Advertising and the American Dream,” Lawrence R. Samuel describes early shows like NBC’s “Coke Time,” in which Eddie Fisher sipped the soda. On an episode of “I Love Lucy” called “The Diet,” Lucy and Desi smoked Philip Morris cigarettes. On “The Flintstones,” the sponsor Alka-Seltzer ruled that no character get a stomach ache, and that there be no derogatory presentations of doctors, dentists, or druggists. On “My Little Margie,” Philip Morris reps struck the phrase “I’m real cool!,” lest it be associated with their competitors Kool cigarettes. If you were a big name—like Jack Benny, whom Samuel calls “the king of integrated advertising”—“plugola” was par for the course. (Benny once mentioned Schwinn bikes, then looked directly into the camera and deadpanned, “Send three.”) There were only a few exceptions, including Sid Caesar, who refused to tout brands on “Your Show of Shows.”
Sponsors were a conservative force. They helped blacklist writers suspected of being Communists, and, for decades, banned plots about homosexuality and “miscegenation.” In Jeff Kisseloff’s oral history “The Box,” from 1995, Bob Lewine, of ABC, describes pitching Sammy Davis, Jr., in an all-black variety show: Young & Rubicam execs walked out, so the idea was dropped. This tight leash affected even that era’s version of prestige TV. In “Brought to You By,” Samuel lists topics deemed off limits as “politics, sex, adultery, unemployment, poverty, successful criminality and alcohol”—now the basic food groups of cable. In one notorious incident, the American Gas Association sponsored CBS’s anthology series “Playhouse 90.” When an episode called “Portrait of a Murderer” ended, it created an unfortunate juxtaposition: after the killer was executed, the show cut to an ad with the slogan “Nothing but gas does so many jobs so well.” Spooked, American Gas took a closer look at an upcoming project, George Roy Hill’s “Judgment at Nuremberg.” The company objected to any mention of the gas chambers—and though the writers resisted, the admen won.
This sponsor-down model held until the late fifties, around the time that the quiz-show scandals traumatized viewers: producers, in their quest to please ad reps, had cheated. Both economic pressures and the public mood contributed to increased creative control by networks, as the old one-sponsor model dissolved. But the precedent had been established: when people talked about TV, ratings and quality were existentially linked, the business and the art covered by critics as one thing. Or, as Trow put it, “What is loved is a hit. What is a hit is loved.”
Kenya Barris’s original concept for the ABC series “Black-ish,” last year’s smartest network-sitcom début, was about a black writer in a TV writers’ room. But then he made the lead role a copywriter at an ad agency, which allowed the network to cut a deal with Buick, so that the show’s hero, Dre, is seen brainstorming ads for its car. In Automotive News, Buick’s marketing manager, Molly Peck, said that the company worked closely with Barris. “We get the benefit of being part of the program, so people are actually watching it as opposed to advertising where viewers often don’t watch it.”
Product integration is a small slice of the advertising budget, but it can take on outsized symbolic importance, as the watermark of a sponsor’s power to alter the story—and it is often impossible to tell whether the mention is paid or not. “The Mindy Project” celebrates Tinder. An episode of “Modern Family” takes place on iPods and iPhones. On the ABC Family drama “The Fosters,” one of the main characters, a vice-principal, talks eagerly about the tablets her school is buying. “Wow, it’s so light!” she says, calling the product by its full name, the “Kindle Paperwhite e-reader,” and listing its useful features. On last year’s most charming début drama, the CW’s “Jane the Virgin,” characters make trips to Target, carry Target bags, and prominently display the logo.
Those are shows on channels that are explicitly commercialized. But similar deals ripple through cable television and the new streaming producers. FX cut a deal with MillerCoors, so that every character who drinks or discusses a beer is drinking its brands. (MillerCoors designs retro bottles for “The Americans.”) According to Ad Age, Anheuser-Busch struck a deal with “House of Cards,” trading supplies of booze for onscreen appearances; purportedly, Samsung struck another, to be the show’s “tech of choice.” Unilever’s Choco Taco paid for integration on Comedy Central’s “Workaholics,” aiming to be “the dessert for millennials.” On NBC, Dan Harmon’s avant-garde comedy, “Community,” featured an anti-corporate plot about Subway paid for by Subway. When the show jumped to Yahoo, the episode “Advanced Safety Features” was about Honda. “It’s not there were just a couple of guys driving the car; it was the whole episode about Honda,” Tom Peyton, an assistant V.P. of marketing at Honda, told Ad Week. “You hold your breath as an advertiser, and I’m sure they did too—did you go too far and commercialize the whole thing and take it away from it?—but I think the opposite happened. . . . Huge positives.”
Whether that bothers you or impresses you may depend on whether you laughed and whether you noticed. There’s a common notion that there’s good and bad integration. The “bad” stuff is bumptious—unfunny and in your face. “Good” integration is either invisible or ironic, and it’s done by people we trust, like Stephen Colbert or Tina Fey. But it brings out my inner George Trow. To my mind, the cleverer the integration, the more harmful it is. It’s a sedative designed to make viewers feel that there’s nothing to be angry about, to admire the ad inside the story, to train us to shrug off every compromise as necessary and normal.
Self-mocking integration used to seem modern to me—the irony of a post-“Simpsons” generation—until I realized that it was actually nostalgic: Jack Benny did sketches in which he playfully “resisted” sponsors like Lucky Strike and Lipton tea. Alfred Hitchcock, on “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” made snide remarks about Bristol-Myers. The audience had no idea that those wisecracks were scripted by a copywriter who had submitted them to Bristol-Myers for approval.
A few weeks ago, Stephen Colbert began hosting CBS’s “Late Show.” In his first show, he pointed to a “cursed” amulet. He was under the amulet’s control, Colbert moaned, and thus had been forced to “make certain”—he paused—“regrettable compromises.” Then he did a bit in which he slavered over Sabra hummus and Rold Gold pretzels. Some critics described the act as satire, but that’s a distinction without a difference. Colbert embraced “sponsortunities” when he was on Comedy Central, too, behind the mask of an ironic persona; it’s likely one factor that made him a desirable replacement for Letterman, the worst salesman on late-night TV.
During this summer of industry chaos, one TV show did make a pungent case against consumerism: “Mr. Robot,” on USA Network. A dystopian thriller with Occupy-inflected politics, the series was refreshing, both for its melancholy beauty and for its unusually direct attack on corporate manipulation. “Mr. Robot” was the creation of a TV newcomer, Sam Esmail, who found himself in an odd position: his anti-branding show was itself rebranding an aggressively corporate network, known for its “blue sky” procedurals—a division of NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast.
“Mr. Robot” tells the story of Elliott Alderson, corporate cog by day, hacker by night, a mentally unstable junkie who is part of an Anonymous-like collective that conspires to delete global debt. In one scene, Elliott fantasizes about being conventional enough for a girlfriend: “I’ll go see those stupid Marvel movies with her. I’ll join a gym. I’ll heart things on Instagram.” He walks into his boss’s office with a Starbucks vanilla latte, the most basic of beverages. This sort of straightforwardly hostile namecheck is generally taboo, both to avoid offending potential sponsors and to leave doors open for their competitors. Esmail says he fought to get real brands in the story, citing “Mad Men” as precedent, as his phone calls with the network’s lawyers went from “weekly to daily.”
Were any of these mentions paid for? Not in the first season—although Esmail says that he did pursue integrations with brands, some of which turned him down and some of which he turned down (including tech companies that demanded “awkward language” about their features). He’s open to these deals in Season 2. “If the idea is to inspire an interesting debate over capitalism, I actually think (depending on how we use it) it can help provoke that conversation even more,” he said. As long as such arrangements are “organic and not forced,” they’re fine with him—what’s crucial is not the money but the verisimilitude that brands provide. Only one major conflict came up, Esmail said, in the finale, when Elliott’s mysterious alter ego screams in the middle of Times Square, “I’m no less real than the fucking meat patty in your Big Mac.” Esmail and USA agreed to bleep “Big Mac”—“to be sensitive to ad sales,” Esmail told me—but they left it in for online airings. Esmail said he’s confident that the network fought for him. “Maybe Comcast has a relationship with McDonald’s?” he mused. (USA told me that the reason was “standards and practices.”)
“Are you asking me how I feel about product integration?” Matt Weiner said. “I’m for it.” Everything on TV is an ad for something, he pointed out, down to Jon Hamm’s beautifully pomaded hair—and he argued that a paid integration is far less harmful than other propaganda embedded in television, such as how cop shows celebrate the virtues of the state. We all have our sponsors. Michelangelo painted for the Pope! What’s dangerous about modern TV isn’t advertisers, Weiner told me; it’s creatives not getting enough of a cut of the proceeds.
Weiner used to work in network television, in a more restrictive creative environment, until he got his break, on “The Sopranos.” Stepping into HBO’s subscription-only chamber meant being part of a prestige brand: no ads, that gorgeous hissing logo, critical bennies. The move to AMC, then a minor cable station, was a challenge. Weiner longed for the most elegant model, with one sponsor—the approach of “Playhouse 90.” But getting ads took hustle, even in a show about them. Weiner’s description of the experience of writing integrations is full of cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, he said, wistfully, he didn’t realize at first that he could say no to integrations. Yet he was frustrated by the ones he couldn’t get, like attaching Revlon to Peggy’s “Basket of Kisses” plot about lipstick. Such deals were valuable—“money you don’t leave on the floor”—but it was crucial that the audience not know about them, and that there be few.
The first integration on “Mad Men,” for Jack Daniel’s, was procured before Weiner got involved; writing it into the script made him feel “icky.” (Draper wouldn’t drink Jack Daniel’s, Weiner told me.) Pond’s cold cream was a more successful fit. But he tried to impose rules: the sponsor could see only the pages its brand was on; dialogue would mention competitors; and, most important, the company couldn’t run ads the night its episode was on the air. Unilever cheated, Weiner claimed—and AMC allowed it. The company filmed ads mimicking the “Mad Men” aesthetic, making the tie with the show visible. If viewers knew that Pond’s was integrated, they wouldn’t lose themselves in the story, Weiner worried.
In the end, he says, he did only three—Heineken was the third (an integration procured after Michelob backed out). I naïvely remarked that Jaguar couldn’t have paid: who would want to be the brand of sexual coercion? “You’d be surprised,” he said. Jaguar didn’t buy a plug, but the company loved the plot—and hired Christina Hendricks to flack the car, wearing a bright-red pantsuit.
Weiner had spent the Television Critics Association convention talking up “Mr. Robot” and he told me that he was “stunned” by Esmail’s show, which he called American TV’s “first truly contemporary anti-corporate message.” Then again, he said, “show business in general has been very good at co-opting the people that bite the hands that feed them.” NBCUniversal was wise to buy into Esmail’s radical themes, he said, because these are ideas that the audience is ready for—“even the Tea Party knows we don’t want to give the country over to corporations.”
Weiner made clear that Coke hadn’t paid for any integration; he mentioned it a few times. Finally, I asked, Why not? “Mad Men” ended in a way that both Coke and viewers could admire. Why not take the money? Two reasons, he said. First, Coca-Cola could “get excited and start making demands.” But, really, he didn’t want to “disturb the purity of treating that ad as what it was.” Weiner is proud that “Mad Men” had a lasting legacy, influencing how viewers saw television’s potential, how they thought about money and power, creativity and the nature of work. He didn’t want them to think that Coke had bought his finale.
There is no art form that doesn’t run a three-legged race with the sponsors that support its production, and the weaker an industry gets (journalism, this means you; music, too) the more ethical resistance flags. But readers would be grossed out to hear that Karl Ove Knausgaard had accepted a bribe to put the Talking Heads into his childhood memories. They’d be angry if Stephen Sondheim slipped a Dewar’s jingle into “Company.” That’s not priggishness or élitism. It’s a belief that art is powerful, that storytelling is real, that when we immerse ourselves in that way it’s a vulnerable act of trust. Why wouldn’t this be true for television, too?
Viewers have little control over how any show gets made; TV writers and directors have only a bit more—their roles mingle creativity and management in a way that’s designed to create confusion. Even the experts lack expertise, these days. But I wonder if there’s a way for us to be less comfortable as consumers, to imagine ourselves as the partners not of the advertisers but of the artists—to crave purity, naïve as that may sound. I miss “Mad Men,” that nostalgic meditation on nostalgia. But embedded in its vision was the notion that television writing and copywriting are and should be mirrors, twins. Our comfort with being sold to may look like savvy, but it feels like innocence. There’s something to be said for the emotions that Trow tapped into, disgust and outrage and betrayal—emotions that can be embarrassing but are useful when we’re faced with something ugly.
Perhaps this makes me sound like a drunken twenty-two-year-old waving a battered copy of Naomi Klein’s “No Logo.” But that’s what happens when you love an art form. In my imagination, television would be capable of anything. It could offend anyone; it could violate any rule. For it to get there, we might have to expect of it what we expect of any art. ♦
*An earlier version of this article misstated the title of Trow’s essay.
