To cleanse the palate, it’s become conventional wisdom that 2020 is the Worst Year Ever, for obvious reasons. I shared that sentiment — until last night, when I watched this trailer.
Now I think it’s the best year ever.
Or I did, until I read about this instant Internet sensation. On first watch I thought the “mini-movie” was going to be an hour long or so, an audacious sustained joke in which a famous corporate icon was plopped into the middle of an otherwise straightforward woman-in-jeopardy Lifetime romantic thriller. But the “mini-movie” is only 15 minutes long.
It’s a commercial for KFC, in partnership with Lifetime. An amusing one, right, but not a true Lifetime movie with a single hallucinatory twist. Watch, then read on.
What’s the difference between this and the Dr. Pepper “Fansville” commercials, except that those are broken into episodes instead of one 15-minute bloc?
Lifetime has winked at the conventions of its original movies before, when it secretly brought in Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig as the romantic leads for its latest project and kept that hush-hush until it leaked shortly before the movie debuted. But instead of a goofy send-up of the Lifetime genre, Ferrell and Wiig played it mostly straight. It wasn’t so much an SNL-esque satire of Lifetime movies as it was a Lifetime movie with two SNL stars. Meh.
Why don’t they own it for once? Do a full-length parody of their signature style. Or, if they don’t want to write a full-length comedy script, take whatever the next script in the pipeline is and extend the Ferrell/Wiig stuntcasting approach to its logical conclusion by dressing the leading man as, say, the Hamburglar. Let none of the other characters comment on it or allude to the fact that it’s weird in the slightest way. After 20 minutes, people would be on the edge of their seats, thinking, “Are they really going to do this for two hours?” That’s the problem with the KFC “mini-movie”: It just won’t last long enough to produce the full comic effect of an absurd extended joke like “The Aristocrats.”
I doubt the audience for these movies would mind at all. It’s mostly moms who are already half-drunk on Chardonnay, right?
