Word: cavemen
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...sometimes happens on TV, the Geico "Cavemen" ad campaign was a good idea born of a lame one. The concept, says Joe Lawson, one of the writers who conceived it, was that signing up with the insurer online was so easy "even a caveman" could do it. "It was just a dumb way of saying that our website is really easy," Lawson says. So he and his collaborators added a twist: a group of modern-day cavemen protesting the stereotyping of the ad-within-an-ad while the agency tries to make amends...
Prejudice begets prejudice. TV has always been looked down on as a poor cousin to the movies, so it needs to look down on something--even if that something is the advertising that allows much of TV to exist. But my skepticism about Cavemen is just the opposite: that the commercials may be too good--too elegant, dry and subtle--to be made into a sitcom...
...beauty of the Geico spots is that they play the characters perfectly straight. There are no club-wielding or fire-inventing jokes. The cavemen play tennis, they go to therapists, they order roast duck with mango salsa. As allegorical stand-ins for minorities, they're more complex than the aggrieved parties usually are in sitcoms. They're not boisterous Al Sharpton firebrands but peevish, passive-aggressive, neurotic yuppies. They do what good TV characters should: they confound expectations...
...eventually caught up, but ever since, there's been a dialogue between the "real" shows and the spots that pay the bills. The conversational humor of The Office--which Lawson cites as a model for the cavemen spots--owes a debt to the deadpan ads from FedEx, Monster.com and so on that target the same upscale demographic. The crossover hasn't always worked: Baby Bob, a talking-baby sitcom based on an ad, was insipid. But Max Headroom, a black-humored sci-fi series based on a Coca-Cola campaign itself based on a British TV show, was brilliantly subversive...
...limit our progress today? Just because something is natural doesn’t make it more or less moral—Huntington’s disease is natural—and if we let such fears dictate our actions we’d be little better off than cavemen. Nature doesn’t provide us with an objective standard for evaluating what a human should be like, other than individuals’ personal criteria for healthiness and happiness. Using genes as malleable puzzle pieces, to be arranged as we like, is no different in intent than nature?...