Marc Cherry Is Not Necessarily Your Brand Whore
As brand names steadily creep into the plots of your favorite shows, TV writers are getting increasingly vocal about their trepidation in accepting these kind of embedded advertising dollars. Concerned that product placements can too easily come across as hacky, obvious commercials that jar viewers out of the story, a group of prominent showrunners, including Desperate Housewives' Marc Cherry, held a news conference to voice their disapproval at the growing trend:
"There's growing concern that if the advertisers start to dictate a story line, just how horrible that would be," said Marc Cherry, creator of ABC's "Desperate Housewives."[...]
Cherry said he wrote one scene at a mall parking lot in cooperation with a car manufacturer that worked because Gabrielle made a joke out of it. But he was recently approached by another auto company that wanted to be featured but wasn't happy with the characters Cherry made available — including Bree's sociopathic son. The deal fell through.
With a hit show, Cherry had the power to say no. He wonders if that will always be the case.
How far Cherry has come. You'd think the long out-of-work writer, who has freely and frequently admitted to needing his mother's financial support just to get by, would be thrilled to have a gig at all. Now the guy's throwing urgent, awareness-raising press conferences devoted to whining about how hard it is to be paid millions of dollars to shoehorn an Oreo into a comic jewel of scene involving Teri Hatcher accidentally locking herself out of her car.
