Clovers In The Atmosphere

I was reading an article in slate the other day about the resuscitation of zombie brands. a zombie brand is a brand with a lot of name recognition (like Tab soda orthe Ford Taurus) which has been discontinued due to sagging sales. At this point it is just a dead brand (like pets.com and the ford pinto), it becomes a zombie when a new product is introduced that bears only marginal resemblance to the old one, but is sold based on the name recognition that the defunct brand continues to garner. Tab, the original diet soda, has been reinvented as a red bull-style energy drink named "Tab." This phenomenon plays upon the cultural landfill of the brains of young adults. There are snippets of ads and sitcom catchphrases floating in our heads. and these represent the easiest way to make something stick in a media-saturated market.

The TV show "brothers and sisters" uses this same post-modern gimmick to create a hyper-real tv show. actors frequently complain about being closely associated with a single successful role; Once they have played a successful role for a long time, particularly on TV, it is difficult for them to get work playing other characters because audiences still see them as Rachel, or The Fonz. TV is close enough to our reality that we cannot see Jason Alexander as anyone besides George Kostanza. It feels weird to have to resuspend our disbelief that George is out there trying to sell us pretzels. This is where "Brothers and Sisters" gets it right. It is using "zombie characters. The show takes the ultimate pigeon-holed actress, Calista Flockhart (who played Ally McBeal, the neurotic and awkward, but fundementally sweet career woman on "Ally McBeal") and brings her back on "B &S" to play the same character. It is easy to believe Calista in this role, because an awkward and bumbling, but fundementally sweet career woman is what we know her to be. "B&S" continues the trend by making Rob Lowe play a clean cut, handsome, well-spoken politico. This was his long-running role on the west wing. Sally Field plays the burdened, but bouyant and pretty mother, like always (this may be more of a type-cast than a zombie character). Jason Lewis replays his meta-part that he honed on "Sex and the City" as a georgeous movie star who doesn't buy into the hype. On 'SOTC" he was smith jarrod. On "B&S" he is Chad Barry. Watching this show is like seeing long lost friends. It is fantastically comforting and generates no cognitive dissonance---until we meet Emily VanCamp again. After all of this zombie character setup, emily, who once played the pretty, sensible, small town girl next door on "Everwood", shows up on "B&S" as the LA party-girl with a drug habit and a deadbeat dad. The disconnect simply doesn't make sense in an imaginitive framework that encourages the viewer to use stored cultural detritus especially after someone has worked so hard to piece together a TV drama from type-cast actors of the last 15 years.