Just watching a repeat of the Simpsons spelling bee episode.
The B-story on that episode, of course, is Homer’s addiction to KrustyBurger’s limited-time-only “Ribwich.”
“It’s not about who got rich offa who or who got exposed to tainted what…”
After the scene where Homer samples his first half-a-dozen Ribwiches (complete with CSI/Requiem for a Dream -style macroshots of the fat and chemicals hitting his circulatory system,) they show the first commercial.
Linda Ellerbee in her book And So It Goes tells of a time when she was responsible for producing a newsbreak for her network. There had been a terrible plane crash with hundreds of fatalities so she devoted the entire two minute segment to it. In the middle of a movie about people trapped on a plane that was about to crash. The segment was followed immediately by an American Express commercial in which Karl Malden intoned that the absolute worst thing that could happen to one on vacation was to lose one’s luggage.
Right after “60 Minutes” did a segment on Marilyn Monroe’s barbituate overdose debate “murder or suicide” , they aired a commercial for Nytol sleep medicine.
I was watching a Hitler Channel documentary on concentration camps: this segment covered the early stages, where the Nazis first machine-gunned Jews, then gassed them in trucks, then finally began working on a plan for effective mass-murder.
Cut to Mercedes-Benz commercial:
“Germans have always been very proud of their engineering skills . . .”
