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Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Cougar Town turns wine into beer


Cougar Town claims to be a TV show "about friends and wine, but not in that order." I've never seen the show, but as a serious baseball fan*, I saw about 1,700 promos for it on TBS during the playoffs.

So here are some thoughts about what Cougar Town's promos say about America's wine culture.

* There's no food in these ads, and wine is chugged in a drinking game, gulped down in a speed test and drunk from the bottle with a straw. Yay! Wine! It's like beer, only red!

* Why is it red? Isn't buttery Chardonnay officially known as Cougar Juice?

* How serious? My wife and I were vacationing in French Polynesia and through the miracle of Slingbox, when the balky wifi on remote islands cooperated, she could watch amazing sunsets from a pier overlooking the crystal-clear, light-blue sea, while I sat beside her watching playoff games on my laptop. I mean, it WAS the playoffs.

* What wine is that anyway? Do they even know? It's like me saying, "I love TV comedies. Let me fast-forward through one while looking away."

* Did anyone find anything funny in these ads? I guess we were supposed to laugh at a blonde cougar woman chugging a glass of wine, but I go to wine country on weekends and it's not all that funny in person. If you can't tell one good joke in 1700 promos, you must not be telling too many in the show.

* Drinking game! Yes, every time somebody says "dumb" I'll take a big slug of this '92 Rioja Gran Reserva. Ready? "Dumb show!" drink "Dumb ads!" drink "Dumb writers!" drink "Dumb network!" pass the bottle -- this is going to take a while.

* Speaking of which, what is it with schlubby guys and airbrushed women on TV? Do you ever see that in real life? Don't they always dump the balding guy for their tennis instructor?

* If TBS' ratings go up -- if this is the way most Americans really relate to wine -- I can adapt. "Next week on The Gray Report: How to suppress the gag reflex so you can drink more faster -- and keep watching Cougar Town!"

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1 comment:

  1. Jack EverittOctober 23, 2012 at 9:53 AM

    When I watch a blu-ray disc of a TV show where someone is holding a glass of red wine, the color of it always looks wrong...I can't even come up with what wine it might be.

    My guess is that they never have wine in the glass but rather colored water that won't stain anything if it's spilled.

    I don't understand why they can't make the color look like actual red wine (as there are so many possible red colors they have to choose from).

    But then again, I can't understand why in every American TV series where the characters are mostly High School students, the actual actors of these "students" are all in their twenties. No one ever looks young enough (nor is) to be in High School. How realistic! (bonus sarcasm)

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