DrDeth is all butthurt about cigarettes on tv, but a mod says we can’t discuss it in that thread.
What I find interesting is DrDeth’s cognitive dissonance regarding the issue:
Pick one or the other. You can’t have both. Either Big Tobacco pays for product placement, or it’s illegal for Big Tobacco to pay for product placement.
Maybe they’re getting around the law some way.
“Hi, I’m from Phillip Morris, the tobacco company – we make cigarettes – and I’d like to pay your production company two million dollars if you’ll do product placement shots, prominently showing frogs. You know, green amphibians. Yes, our tobacco company would be very grateful if you’d have frogs in as many establishing shots in your movie as you possibly can. I never said a single word about cigarettes. Gosh, it’s nice doing business with a producer who knows how to read between the lines.”
Well, they can pay for smoking, just not product placement. And yes, **Trinopus **they do that also, and apparently have.
Not to mention bags of cash, nose candy and the like.
and for those that say placement stopped:
http://scholarship.law.umt.edu/cgi/v...77&context=mlr
The question is- Big Tobacco lied to us about cancer, about heart disease, about product placement- *do you think they have stopped lying?
*
Smoking in films & TV is up. Coincidence?
So OP- what do you think will stop Big Tobacco from lying and breaking the law?
I think you’re a raving lunatic, but I do concede that it’s hard to argue with your cite:
I think arguing about whether the devil is a good role model and should therefore not be seen smoking is ludicrous. He’s supposed to be a bit of a wanker, to put it mildly. The fact that there may or may not be a long term character arc about his redemption is irrelevant to this point.
Is “big pot” getting money for the roaches getting passed around? What about the liquor industry? Lucifer owns a nightclub. Lots of boozing.
The fact that all of these things, not just any one of them, are indicators to the audience that our anti-hero is “not a nice guy” seems to be completely lost to DrDeth.
Good lord knows (ha, ha) who is getting the kick backs for the punishments and pysychological torture.
I don’t have the full context of the discussion, but in any case I don’t think that a tobacco company would care for their product placement involving a “good” character- they’d want a “cool” character smoking.
I think it’s Big Marijuana paying Fox since he’s shown smoking pot.
This may come as a shock to some, but people do still smoke. I haven’t visited the original thread but I don’t understand the thinking that the only reason that characters are shown as smokers is due to anything deeper than the fact that people still smoke 
Smoking commonly seen on TV and funded by Big Tobacco? Is it 1955 already? My, how the time flies.
The character is Lucifer. He was immortal. There were no consequences to his actions. He can drink, smoke, get shot, do drugs, all with no ill effects. As the story progresses he finds he is becoming mortal so he’ll have to deal with not being indestructible.
FWIW, I’m a smoker who has never seen Lucifer, and anecdotally it appears to me that smoking on film is way, way down. The other day my wife even pointed out how weird it was that the character Hilly from The Help is shown smoking and drinking while driving near the end of the movie.
I definitely agree that smoking is less visible in movies and tv. It makes sense because less people are smoking IRL. However that doesn’t mean that nobody smokes so I guess I wasn’t following why Dr. Deth would attribute a character’s smoking to some shenanigans on the behalf of Big Tobacco. Now that it’s been explained the character in question is *Lucifer *(my new, Sweet Baby), that claim sounds doubly stupid.
Lucifer is also show having straight sex with his therapist.
Wait a minute. Big Marijuana (AKA Big Dope)? Straight Sex?
Uncle Cecil is in on it, too.
Connect the Dot, People!
Not that I have a problem with it, but its actually amped up on TV. The Americans, The Magicians, DC’s legends of Tommorow, House of Cards, Lucifer, and Shameless, The walking dead to name a few. In the case of The Americans and DC, its been to establish a period, the 80’s and 50’s to be exact, and you would have expected to see smoking in that context.
So far its been mainly context, and not culture, so it should not be treated it any differently from smoking weed or drinking alcohol on TV.
Declan
Don’t forget The Walking Dead with their wall to wall, plot-centric smoking. Which is weird, since two years into the apocalypse, I would think most of those cigarettes would be stale as shit.
Post-apocalyptic Boston is full of cigarettes in Fallout 4. There’s a pack on practically every horizontal indoor surface in the game.
To summarize the original thread, Dr Deth just randomly put in a statement that Big Tobacco was lining FOX News’s pockets. There was no context, no bridge, and no justification for what it had to do with Lucifer. We asked what the hell it had to do with the price of tea in China, and drama ensued.
Actually I did mention them , but left out z nation. Smoking sets a retrospective scene in a shot, your eyes are drawn to the cigarette(s), give the actors a close up , and the dialogue takes over. In that situation its a cheap special effect.
Also given their circumstances, it would be an old world luxury. To be able to do something that’s normal and pedestrian.
Declan
Huh. I quit watching at S3, but I don’t remember anybody smoking on TWD.
Then again, I guess that being in a post-apocalyptic wasteland is as good a excuse to start as any.
Reading is hard!