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Comment by ebbv | Hacker News Reader

The thing is it's kind of a false narrative. Because the shows aren't entirely ad free. They're mostly ad free, but Lost in Space for example featured an extremely jarring product placement for Oreos which came up repeatedly in an episode. It was just as jarring for me as ad placements, disrupting the narrative and throwing me out of the story. Especially since hte Oreo package was identical to the ones we have now even though the show is supposedly decades in the future.

This happens in most Netflix shows; jarring and obvious product placement that disrupts the flow of the story.

So it's not that they are ad free, they just featured reduced ads in most episodes.

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Some product placement can be cheesy no matter what situation it's in but I'd take a few moments of cheesy product insertion over the typical pattern of a US serial: 2 seconds of blackness (or 3 minutes of commercials) every 12 minutes or so, 20 minutes of story time traded for adverts, and dialog you would never encounter in a more continuous story because it assumes the audience is intelligent enough to figure it out or start from the beginning. It's mind-numbing in the extreme.

Bringing up a pack of Oreos and waving it around the screen so everybody can really see it's a pack of Oreos is one thing, but the endless trudge of scenes like this is something else:

X: "So you got the brief from the NSA?"

Y: "The National Security Agency, they monitor all the communications in the US to prevent terrorism... yes I got the brief. You bring in Mr Snucklebum for questioning?"

X: "Snucklebum, the man under suspicion for trading classified secrets? Yeah he's in interrogation, right through here."

- alarm bells, ad break -

Y: "Snucklebum's escaped! Lockdown!"

X: "Snucklebum, the guy under suspicion for trading classified secrets to the NSA?"

Y: "The national security agency. Yeah"

I've always admired a show that can explain the plot and setting without characters having to say obvious, out of character, things to each other. Black Mirror is one such show.

Lazy exposition is a plague in the industry, and is pretty prevalent in basically every broadcast show. CW and Lifetime shows tend to be the most offensive here.

There are a ton of shows that let you discover the show along with the characters though; Breaking Bad, The Wire, Carnivale, etc. Those shows tend to be well regarded, and most people don't realize that it's just the lack of exposition making the people pay attention that they like.

The first season of Miami Vice used a fake Ferrari Daytona. Ferrari got miffed about that, and offered them a real Ferrari Testarossa if they got rid of the fake Daytona. Hence, the characters blew up the Daytona and moved to the Testarossa.

It was a good year for Ferrari sales, too :-) The Testarossa was one of the stars of the show, and nobody minded it. Probably the best product placement ever!

I'm not talking about ads, I'm talking about interrupting the show.

I don't know if the Oreos thing was a product placement (though it seems likely), but if I'm writing a script or a screenplay, I probably have fewer mental gymnastics to hurdle through to inject Oreos into a script than I do to have to accommodate a show-break.

On the flip side, it's worth pointing out that it isn't either/or, as shows with commercial breaks may still include product placement, and not all of them are going to be as mightily integrated as Snyder's of Hanover was to Psych.

Movies have that as well though. Remember the Nokia in the original Matrix movie? It was slowed down for a second while it was thrown in a bin.

The Mighty Morphin Power Rangers movie has Krispy Kreme product placement to the point of absurdity, even having the main villain chowing down on one during the action.

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