KFC - Finger-lickin' deceptive

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KFC.

We all know what it means, right? Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Not so fast.

Tell anyone from around the world that you're from Kentucky and immediately they'll come back with "Kentucky Fried Chicken?" I've seen it happen time and time again. I've known people who could barely speak English but who can say "Kentucky Fried Chicken."

Somewhere in our cultural past, fried foods became taboo. Pinpointing this is tricky, because surely we all knew fried foods weren't good for us for quite some time before the "new health consciousness" kicked in. And just as the new health consciousness is telling us now that carbs are bad for us (though last I checked, they were the base of the nutritional pyramid), somewhere along the line this way of thinking came to outlaw fried foods.

And it's true. They're right, you know. The new health consciousness is dead on in its targeting of fried foods. They clog up your arteries. Lead to heart disease. They're not good for the human body. Fried foods are trouble all 'round.

And here's KFC's problem -- how can they rebrand themselves when, for years, the word "fried" has been part of the name of the product? Never mind that it's paired with the word "Kentucky," and that culturally Kentucky and fried chicken go together like pickin' and grinnin'.

As an advertising writer myself, I've been in much the same spot. I've been asked to write "fresh, healthy" copy for a product that was neither fresh nor healthy. I'd routinely get notes back -- "we can't say low-carb, how about we say 'lower-carb', that way the customer knows it's not high, because we can say it's not high" or "legally we can't say fresh, since they come from a freezer in Minnesota."

KFC's clearly up against the wall. Time for some good, old-fashioned ingenuity. And that's where they dropped the ball.

Strategy A:
Change the name from Kentucky Fried Chicken to KFC. Nowhere in a KFC restaurant will you see the name Kentucky, unless it's in a promotional piece featuring the slowly-fading icon of Colonel Sanders. They'll simply call themselves KFC from now on. And that'll be that. No more "fried", since they can't think of another word to replace "Fried" with that still works in context with "Kentucky" and "Chicken." And to be fair, it worked. The public vernacular now refers to it as KFC.

Strategy B:
They're getting buried with the fried thing. But hey, chicken's good for you, right? So technically, since fried chicken isn't a greasy cheeseburger, it's healthy. Well, healthier, at least. So they go with the healthy message.

Now, I don't know if you were lucky enough to see any of the spots that followed this strategy, but the commercials born of this thinking were borderline absurdist. One featured a young wife bringing home a bucket of chicken home to her couch-anchored husband with the line "it's okay. It's healthy." Needless to say, this spot lasted only a few weeks because we, the general public, while easily hoodwinked, are not about to believe that fried chicken is healthy. We may miss a lot, but give us a little credit.

Strategy C:
An extraneous strategy, really. Seems everyone still knew that the "F" in "KFC" still stood for fried. But they changed it already, remember? It's not "fried" anymore, it's KFC! Apparently there was some need felt in corporate to make sure the fried message disappeared entirely. So what now?

They change the "F", that's what. We make sure that everyone knows the "F" stands for "fresh," not "fried," and we call the whole product "kitchen fresh chicken." And the spots? Several people sniffing into the air saying "is that kitchen fresh chicken?" Of course it is! And it's delicious!

So what are we left with? Chicken, that's true. From Kentucky? Not anymore. Fried? Yes, but let's pretend it's not. Fresh? No, but let's pretend it is. Kitchen? I suppose in some loose way, it is created in a "kitchen" (but only with added finger quotation marks).

In the end, you really can't fault KFC for at least trying. Though they vastly overrestimated the susceptiveness of the American consumer, they had to do something. And short of changing one's name and brand history altogether, they weren't left with much of an option. It's just unfortunate for them that while the consumer population was so quick to accept fried foods as Satan incarnate, KFC was unable to turn the same easily-fooled public around to believe that they were, in fact, "kitchen fresh chicken."

And KFC seems to still be doing just fine. So don't lose sleep.

Instead, save your tears for the pork rind industry.

Fox in the Henhouse

Not long ago, the Fox Network unveiled its new reality series "The Littlest Groom," a "Bachelor"-style program which began with a 4'5" single fellow and followed him through an elimination process in which he'd pick his soul mate. Let's be honest. It was really just "The Bachelor," only with little people. When certain activist groups caught wind of the upcoming show, they caused a fuss in the media concerning Fox's exploitation of little people. Fox combatted this uproar by releasing the statement: "We have gone to great lengths to make sure everybody on this program is treated with dignity and respect."

What made this statement interesting is that no more than six months ago, Fox had aired another program including little people -- only the program was entitled "Man Versus Beast" and featured a group of forty little people racing against an elephant to see which one would be the first to pull a jetliner 75 feet on an airport tarmac. Now THAT's dignity and respect.

Fox continues to set the bar for dignity and respect in its announcement of "The Swan," which, according to the press, "takes women who are stuck in a rut and revitalizes them by restoring their beauty and confidence via incredible physical, mental and emotional transformations."

Riiiight.

What this means, in Fox-speak, is that the show plans to take eighteen women they deem to be unattractive and perform intensive plastic surgery on them, then team each with a coach, therapist, trainer, cosmetic surgeon, dentist and stylist. The promos portend that the contestants will undergo in-depth physical reconstruction and be unable to see themselves until a dramatic event during which each woman will be revealed to herself in a mirror to, we assume, suddenly realize she's beautiful.

In the Fox ethos, this is a wonderful public service because beautiful people don't have problems. Everyone loves beautiful people. Fox has shown us this in its other pillars of broadcasting -- "Paradise Island" and "Forever Eden," both programs in which beautiful people argue with other beautiful people because no one involved has the capacity to realize that they have absolutely no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Now, let's suppose for a moment that Fox, through its magic machine, could take anything you don't like physically about yourself and make it go away. Wow. That's amazing, right? God bless the Fox network. Who doesn't have something they'd like to change about their physical appearance?

What Fox is saying is this: by fixing the flaws you've lived with your entire life, you'll revitalize your energy, your appearance and your state of being not only internally, but societally. You'll feel great about yourself. And job offers will pour in, because hey, you look terrific. The world is yours.

But because this is Fox we're talking about, there's a catch. And the catch is this: not only are they going to transform you from ugly to beautiful, because you're ugly and you should be beautiful, but once they've done it, and revealed to you how wonderful you are, and revitalized your life, etc. etc....they will proceed put you on stage in what they're hyping as "The Ultimate Beauty Pageant" and judge you! Again!

It's all true. Horribly, horribly true. Once your body is fixed as perfectly as medical science can make it, you get to stand with the other "swans" as judges rank your physical appearance. And negate the entire process. So while you may be beautiful and rejuvenated, and feel great about yourself, just bear in mind that you're not as beautiful as Shirley there to your left. Sorry.

But hey. You knew what you were getting when you signed up, right? I mean, this is Fox, after all.

And the scariest part of it all? Press releases are referring to the dramatic end-of-series beauty contest as "The 1st Annual Swan Pageant."

Which means there will be more.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Fox won't stop until it has destroyed us all.

True Grit

HBO's latest foray into original dramatic programming, the western ornery-fest "Deadwood," is an exercise in intensity. Everything's intense. The characters are intense. The language is intense. The lighting and sets are intense. Everyone looks very intensely at the camera. Characters shove their hats onto their heads with various degrees of intensity. But intensity does not a classic make.

As the network has shown through exceptional dramatic series as "Six Feet Under" and "The Sopranos," HBO knows how to let the fire cook a good plot. How many times have we been left after an episode thinking "something big's getting ready to go down." That's a great feeling. It makes you want to watch next week. It makes you wait for next week, and spend all week talking to everyone else you know who watched it about what's happening next week.

But while "Deadwood" shows signs of life, it also oozes the feeling that they're trying a little too hard. Everyone looks as if they're going to have an aneurism at any moment, and you know that little vein that pops out of your head when you get mad? It's the star of the show.

The central plotline of the story revolves around Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant), an ex-sheriff who's left his badge in the dust to move with his partner to the mining town of Deadwood, where the two plan to open a hardware business and capitalize on the mining boom. And that's all fine and good. It's the American way. But Bullock comes across as the anti-Earp, brooding and seething each line effectively but with a little too much anger. Why's he so angry? He just is. Because that, as HBO wants us to believe, is how cowboys really were. But we've barely come to know Bullock, or what he stands for, or how he takes his eggs, before we're already saddled with his "man possessed" qualities. They just don't let us like him. And I'm beginning to think that's the thread here -- you're not supposed to like any of these folks.

I applaud the network's attempt here; they want to show us a different Old West, a place that was threatening, dark and full of miscreants. But "Deadwood" plays out like "The Sopranos" circa 150 years ago. Tony Soprano is a mobster, sure, but he's also a person. Sometimes he laughs, sometimes he beats people up, sometimes he sits down and watches TV. But Olyphant's Bullock, so far, doesn't do anything human. He just stares at people and hisses out his lines. And he's our hero? (A: yes, apparently, he is.)

Olyphant's supporting cast includes Keith Carradine as Wild Bill Hickok, who at least shows signs that his organic makeup is that of a human being, Ian McShane as an unscrupulous saloon/brothel-keep who's apparently just one thing: unscrupulous, and Robin Weigert as Calamity Jane Canary (who seems to be trying to play her character as tough as nails, but instead just sort of acts semi-retarded). Mix in a foppish dandy from the east, an Igor-esque hotel owner, and various others that the wardrobe department just doused in dirt, and you've got several variations on the same character. Just choose the defining characteristic -- tough or crooked?

Despite the fact that each character is either tough (read: noble...I guess), or crooked (kills whoever they want to), the cast can agree on one thing -- they're all going to swear as much as possible. Because what says tough/crooked more than gratuitous profanity? Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese take us into the world of the criminal by showing us how these people speak, which is often laden with profanity. But "Deadwood" shows us that any sentence is a good place to throw something in (how many times have you heard someone use the phrase "I damn f*cking am.") There are spots in the script where one can't even tell what the point of the sentence is. I'm as desensitized to profanity as they come, and colorful language doesn't frighten me off a bit, but as a writer, I shudder when grammar and syntax suffer because apparently a character can't speak without throwing in so many four letter words that you forget what the original sentence must have been.

"Deadwood" could have been a very interesting show; a different look at the lawlessness of the true Old West, replacing the pristine "white hats vs. black hats" genre with a realistic historical viewpoint of the frontier as a haven for thieves, murderers and would-be-millionaires. Instead, it sets its levels at "way way intense" and leaves its audience rolling its eyes -- excuse me -- it's damn f*cking eyes.