One's an isolated event, two's a pattern, three's a crowd, and more than that's a definite trend. So here's a new TV trend: In commercials for new phones and phone plans, the people using them tend to be insufferable idiots. So is that the target audience? Or just the unavoidable conclusion?...
The one that first caught my eye, for Sprint's "unlimited service" plan, featured an insensitive doctor whose bedside manner was high-tech, and highly abrasive.
His patient, a football player with his right knee bandaged and iced, has just received the bad news that he's finished for the rest of the season. The doctor just informed him... by email.
When the athlete reacts with disbelief, the doctor holds out his phone to play a video. "Your knee's totally shattered," he says. "See how hard that guy hit you?"
And when the athlete moans and says he doesn't want to see it, the doctor replies soothingly, "Relax. It's not costing me any extra."
The doctor appeared later, in another Sprint commercial, sending photos and texts that made fun of a neighbor's Christmas lights display. So he wasn't only a jerk in one ad -- he was a repeat offender. And, as it quickly turned out, he wasn't alone.
Another Sprint ad featured a couple at a restaurant table, each holding their respective mobile devices. The young woman looks up, and asks in disbelief, "I just got a text from you that you're breaking up with me?"
Yes, she did. And the commercial goes on from there.
A newer Sprint ad echoes a similar why-talk-when-we-can-"connect" theme, showing two people, in immediate proximity, communicating by electronic rather than natural means. One character -- the fool -- thinks it's natural. The other -- the recipient -- thinks it's ridiculous. So what are we viewers supposed to think? If we identify with the recipient, why buy the plan?
Here are the specifics: Two young men, Lyle and Rick, at a restaurant table barely big enough to hold their laptops.
Lyle, the ad soon reveals, has called a high-tech, wired-in business meeting, even though Lyle and Rick are the only employees of the two-man business.
Rick thinks Lyle is a jerk for emailing and texting and tweeting him when he's right in front of him -- and so do we.
But it doesn't cost any extra, so why not add up the minutes, and jam up the bandwidth?
Yet another Sprint ad moves the conflict from a restaurant to a family dinner table (shown at the top of this column), where mom, dad, kids and the grandparents are seated in the dining room.
It looks, at first, like a cozy, old-fashioned dinner, but mom is delivering some bad news to the kids -- that the grandparents are moving in, and taking one of their rooms.
And she's delivering the news by texting and tweeting it. When her daughter objects, she expresses sympathy. "Oh, honey," she says -- then offers to teach her how to tweet.
Trick or tweet? What kind of anti-social behavior is being sold here?
And it's not fair, or accurate, to blame it all on an ill-conceived ad campaign by Sprint. Rivals in the phone-plan business have come up with the same intentionally annoying sales pitch.
One ad for the AT&T Network has a husband working late at the office when his wife calls, asking if he remembered to make dinner reservations for their anniversary.
Of course he did, he replies, lying -- and while talking to her, and saying (lying again) that he's already on the way, he uses the multi-use capability of his phone to search the web, find a restaurant and book directions.
Hey, comsumers: If you're the kind of jerk who forgets your wedding anniversary, then this phone, and this plan, is for you!
Or how about the ad, also from AT&T, that has a guy sitting alone at a diner, chatting to a friend on the phone and betting some money on the year some pop-culture event took place. While he's talking, he's looking it up on the web -- and when he realizes he's wrong, he claims that the restaurant's on fire, and hangs up.
But what's worse is that, the whole time he's doing that, a waitress is standing there, waiting to take his order, and being completely ignored.
Hey, rude young bastards -- this is the phone plan for you!
If you identify with the characters in these ads, you'd have to be crazy.
And that's the only reasonable explanation for the ads by yet another phone carrier -- for the Virgin Android -- which use as their spokesperson a crazy stalker woman, hiding in a tree outside the home of a young man she's just dated for the first time.
Crouched in the tree, she surfs the web to see whether he's updated his Facebook status or tweeted about her, while she goes on and on with a fervor that makes her more certifiable than credible. And if there's any doubt as to her mental stability, the tag line for the ad literally spells it out:
"Go Crazy on Android."
So that's it. These ads are making it fairly clear, with the message they're delivering to viewers. This, pretty much, is what they're saying:
"You'd have to be nuts to buy one of our phones, or into our phone plan.
"So if you are, babe, this one's for you..."