So, last night’s episode of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia basically had product placements for Coors and Dave & Buster’s all up in it, every which way and even sideways, during the commercial breaks. And if this post on Slashfilm (spoilers) — possibly penned during the same year Neil Young wrote “This Note’s For You” — is anything to go by, THE! GEEKS! ARE! UPSET! But whether the product placements are “tasteful” or not, you gotta wonder: Why? For one, we live in a post-sell-out world, where frankly, for a lot of people (and certainly younger ones disinclined to the Baby Boomer/rockist tendency to believe they “own” some part of the pop culture they consume), the very concept of selling out is quaint, a relic. (Consider: Pearl Jam, who once spent years loudly farting in Ticketmaster’s general direction and patting themselves on the back for not making videos, are now marketing their new album exclusively through Target; weirder still, that album has probably the only listenable single they’ve ever made.)
Then, there’s this: Always Sunny is itself a celebration Our Shared Loser Lifestyle, and the culture of lowered expectations that allows us to take in, week after week, a show about socially maladjusted, intellectually un-curious, underemployed, underachieving proles and then go, hey, that’s us! The episode itself is called “The Great Recession,” and implicit in all that is the notion that, in tough times, you gotta do what you gotta do to pay the bills. Doesn’t anybody get this? It’s what I’ll be thinking about all weekend when I’m driving my Infiniti around the Main Line, noshing on delicious SoyJoy bars and listening to the new Pearl Jam. If I was a rapper, nobody’d bat an eye.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2009 at 11:57 am.