There are a lot of drug commercials on TV, and this troubles me on several levels. (This is an almost exclusively American phenomenon, by the way, as the only other nation in the world that allows direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription medications on television is New Zealand.)
I have always found the idea of drug commercials to be strange. I mean, shouldn’t your doctor be the one to suggest that you might need this prescription medication or that based on a specific condition you might actually have? Isn’t it putting the cart before the horse (or having the tail wag the dog) to expect a patient to request a certain medication from his doctor? And setting aside the fact that there are people in the world who suffer from hypochondria and hardly need new ailments to worry about, who on earth would actually take any of these medications after hearing such a litany of terrifying side effects?
But lately, the commercials themselves have gotten … weird.
Participate in this little experiment, and I think you will see almost immediately what I mean. The next time a commercial comes on for the charmingly named Farxiga (or Humira, or Trulicity, or Jardiance, or Ozempic), mute the sound and try to ignore the text appearing on the screen. And then ask yourself: Who are these people? What exactly are they doing, and why? Do I know people like this? Do actual humans interact in these ways? Would my grandson really enjoy picking olives with me? Would my preteen daughters really rise before dawn to have breakfast with me because my skin has cleared up? Are laundromats that much fun? Does the town I live in even have a gazebo? And, perhaps most importantly, how many piers are there in the world, and do they all feature jazz bands?
You see the weirdness now too, I think. The people who suffer from these conditions (psoriatic arthritis, atrial fibrillation, DVT, diabetes) all clearly love to exercise in groups in the park, walk/dine/dance on the pier, play exotic percussion instruments—and would do all of these things more freely and more frequently if they could only treat their conditions with one pill a day. That’s strange enough.
But do these people also all live in Grandview?
I should explain. There was a TV show in the mid-2000s called Ghost Whisperer. It starred Jennifer Love Hewitt as Melinda Gordon, and it took place in the fictional town of Grandview, where Melinda owned an antique store. And helped earthbound spirits resolve their problems and cross over into the light. That part of the show never bothered me. But Grandview drove me insane.
You see, I’m pretty sure this Grandview has never existed. It is an idealized American small town with a gorgeous little town square (complete with gazebo) surrounded on all sides by thriving storefront businesses and populated with multiple coffee carts and residents who walk everywhere, know everyone, and carry their groceries in eco-friendly mesh totes. The streets that radiate away from the central square are lined on both sides with stately, impeccably maintained Victorian homes and charming cottages whose front yards overflow with rosebushes, trellises, and wheelbarrows spilling forth masses of impatiens and geraniums. And, apparently, a shit ton of ghosts.
Could this place actually exist?
Before you remind me that “This is television,” let me remind you that Jessica Fletcher, the author and sleuth featured in Murder, She Wrote, lived in charming Cabot Cove, Maine; and while that town was idyllic, attractive, and had a generally agreeable populace (setting aside the shocking murder rate), it seemed real in a way that Grandview never did. The streets were imperfectly paved. People had bad moods sometimes. There were hills, for God’s sake.
I have friends who live in small towns here in Minnesota and elsewhere. I love small towns. I love a good gazebo, and the one in St. Peter is one of the finest. But it happens to sit on a major state highway and shares land with a Vietnam War Memorial (which is stunning, by the way), and there is not a small business within blocks. Off the main streets of St. Cloud, the Victorian homes are stately, and the cottages are charming, but they are all in varying, often dramatic, states of disrepair. You would fall in love with downtown Watertown, South Dakota. And you would have your choice of storefronts in which to open your antique store, since the occupancy rate is only about 15%. But I couldn’t guarantee that you would ever have any customers.
Back to the commercials. Setting them in these fantasy towns is clearly intentional. Someone somewhere decided that the target customer for these ads is a person who dreams of living in a place like this. Here’s a hint: the famed retirement community in Florida called The Villages feature two “downtowns,” one done up in the style of an idealized (white) American small town, and one done up like an idealized (white) southern plantation community.
But there is another curious characteristic to these ads. In addition to featuring small town schools that have guitar ensembles (is that even a thing?), they also show a lot of interracial couples. And interracial families. In fact, if you look closely, you will notice that the cast of characters in every scene is perfectly balanced in terms of gender, age, and skin tone, and there are a lot of people who could be described as “soft ethnic” (an appalling term from the commercial world: A “soft ethnic” person is someone who is not white, but also not too black or brown, and so presumably not too off-putting).
I don’t really know what is going on here. I’m getting mixed messages from these ads. Among other things, I’m getting the sense that my idealized vision of the way my life should look is not shared by everyone else in America. But I would offer this critique to the makers of these ads: By trying to show everyman in everyplace, you have actually created a world so far removed from anyone’s tangible reality that you risk alienating everyone.
