Davy Jones visiting Marcia Brady has been replaced by a visit from Justin Bieber

This kind of thing is much better than shows like Bones where the characters blatantly hawk products during the episode

Now you've given them ideas for future episodes to film.


I remember an episode of Alias when the bad guys are getting away and Sidney yells "Get in the F-150 (Ford SUV)". For some reason, that just made me laugh at the blatent plug. From then on, my friends & I would MST3K our own Alias product plugs into the show.

All the car references and slow camera pans of the dashboards are shameless, yes.

The one time "Bones" did it right was with "Avatar", because it was an in-joke thanks to Squintern actor Joel David Moore who was one of the stars of the film.

30 Rock still does it best.

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Game shows used to do this too for re-runs. At the end on Nickelodeon shows, they would have the "Promotional considerations provided by..." and then there would be images of products that didn't even exist at the time the show aired.

Law and Order producer Dick Wolf was interviewed about this on 60 Minutes several years ago. At the time, CBS made a big deal over the fact that he was the only TV executive willing to speak on record and on camera about the issue. This digital product insertion was supposedly brought on by the fear that Tivo users were able to skip commercials (that premise was used in a Simpsons episode). While I appreciate that advertisers/broadcasters would be concerned people might skip commercials, it's like they woke up from suspended animation. My VCR's had had 30- and 60-second skip options for ten years when that segment aired ... and I'm always behind technologically.

I imagine it's similar to the debate going on in that thread over whether home taping of LPs/cassettes/CDs is the same as downloading/uploading digital files via the internet. In that, technically something could be done before, but it was more cumbersome and (ostensibly) less damaging to their bottom line.

Sure, you could record TV shows on VCRs, but for most people it wasn't as easy as with a DVR. Remember the joke was about how hard it was to program a VCR and people would leave the clock flashing 12:00 because they didn't know how to set it. And then you had to mess with tapes. It seems like skipping commercials wasn't controversial until DVRs were introduced, which had much greater ease of use and features specifically to accommodate it.

Then again, maybe there was a controversy when VCRs were introduced, and we just don't remember it or didn't hear about it (it was pre-web, after all). And then it went away, like the fears about home video, only to be reignited when DVRs came along.

Bingo.

Not to mention remembering to set the VCR to record a show every week (until later machines could record weekly). Add in a couple dozen shows and juggling tapes and it's just wasn't worth the hassle for most people.

DVR's simplified everything. Set it and forget it for as many shows as you like and boom...fast forward at will.