Every night I sit down in front of my TV for the local NBC News (Channel 4 here in NYC) and every single night I get commercial breaks that feature these, some of the most horribly directed, written, and acted advertisements ever produced.  There’s 3 of them total and they air in various combinations, with often repeating the same one more than once during the same commercial break.  They are hilarious the first time you see them, but after that you will want to violently injure every single person involved.  Here they are with some analysis from yours truly.

 

 

OK so this is the first.  It doesn’t start off that bad.  The delivery of “I think we’ve been robbed” is a little poor but otherwise not abnormal.  Then we hit the “Rewind” and show the alternate reality in which these people have the Slomins Shield.  Now we discover that the neighbors have been robbed instead.  This is where we start losing any grip on reality.  This woman is so angry that her neighbors did not get the Slomins Shield.  Like really, really, abnormally, not at all proportionally angry.  Also way to overact.  Was no one directing this?  Did no one at any point go “Hey maybe you should tone down that reaction a little/a hell of a lot?”  I have worked on commercials.  I know that there are people from the agency and people from the client both analyzing every single second of everything that’s going on.  How did this make it to the air?

 

But we’ve only just begun.  Now let’s visit another family.

 

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This one starts off with the crazy.

 

You know I’m not comfortable leaving the kids and the babysitter home alone.

 

Then why the hell did you hire a babysitter?  Isn’t that the entire point?  That the babysitter is going to be left alone with the kids?  And wow this woman is also really angry that this guy did not know better.  At least the second part of this scenario is pretty normal.

 

Now we get to my personal favorite.

 

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This entire ad is insane.  First off they didn’t bother with any kind of noise effect that the woman might have heard.  She wakes up from a dead sleep, jumps up within a half second and gets her husband (presumably, boyfriend? one night stand? Some things we will never know.) to investigate.  If she’d maybe have awoken and maybe waited to ensure she heard something this might be more normal.  Also apparently she does this a lot judging by how fast that dude moves and how unconcerned he seems.  But then we “Rewind” and hit the second half.  This time the guy doesn’t get out of bed or even wake up fully because the Slomins Shield is on.  So the woman goes right back to bed without a second thought and a smile on her face.  The issue here is even with your alarm set, if there’s someone in your house alarm companies are notoriously slow to respond and by the time a cop got there you could be dead.  What if it’s a rapist or murderer?  This is very troubling.  If I think someone broke into my house I get the fuck out of there, or at the very least call the cops or investigate (as in the first part of this scenario).  Isn’t there some kind of panic button on the alarm itself?  Anyway the thing I do know is that you do not just go back to sleep unworried because you have an alarm.  Seriously.  The lack of any common sense is both comical and extremely bothersome.

 

Anyway I thought I’d share these with the world, as they are a constant pain in my ass (to get the effect play each of those over and over and over and you’ll see what I mean).  I hope at least you get some comedy out of them.