What’s up with Lady Dynamite?
By Ronnie Garza
She regrets winning Christmas with those Black Friday spots and on the surface Maria Bamford’s new show is critical of Target’s corporate greed. But Target brand Up&Up can be found 4 times in the series. What’s up with that? In his latest Revisionist History podcast, “The Satire Paradox,” Malcolm Gladwell argues that American satire isn’t always what it seems. Depending on the material it can be biting, toothless or defanging. Adding to that conversation, this article is a basic content analysis of the corporate satire in Lady Dynamite.
Maria Bamford is the star and executive producer of Lady Dynamite, a new Netflix original comedy series where she plays a fictionalized version of herself. Bamford is brilliant. She’s weird and razor sharp with a soft touch. She’s a voice for people struggling with mental illness. She’s a very rare and very talented human being.
In Lady Dynamite, we meet Maria at three different times in her life. The present, where she is slowly getting back into Hollywood. The Duluth past, where she is in outpatient treatment after a mental breakdown. And the Hollywood past, which led to the breakdown.
Bamford’s an alt comic who started out doing stand-up, then voice work for shows like CatDog and Adventure Time. She picked up roles on TV and eventually developed the Christmas Champ character with Target, leading to the highest grossing Black Friday in the company’s history. But with success in Hollywood came stress, anxiety and ultimately breakdown. Bamford’s new show points to internal conflicts she was having with being a spokesperson for Target.
Bamford recently voiced her concerns about Target’s position on worker unions and her personal politics.
“They make everything overseas, super-cheap without unions, and everyone’s non-unionized over here, but I was a union worker who was making not only union wages but much more than that. On a person level I am — at least the story I always told myself — is that I was a non-consumerist. I don’t think people should buy more.”
The show is as kind of therapy. The narrative arc is critical of Target, in the guise of Checklist, while simultaneously showing us one of the more complex depictions of mental illness anywhere. People recently interviewed her about the response to the show.
“I went through a nightmare, but it means a lot to me that other people with mental illness tell me the show has helped them and made them laugh, getting that reaction makes me feel like I’m being useful in life, and that’s good.”
This is clearly one of the biggest achievements of the show so far and something important that’s happening in people’s lives. It’s also just interesting storytelling and really funny, so it’s hard to hate on a show like this. But the question has to be asked. What’s going on with these product placements?
The show is clearly antagonistic towards the company. So what’s the rationale in advertising for the same company you are criticising? Is the show so low budget that the only funding they could get was from Target? It wouldn’t seem so. Over 100 different products are placed in various ways throughout the series. Is Bamford taking their money but sticking it to the man by use of satire and irony in her show? It’s hard to tell.
Gladwell’s critique of satire throws national humor into a very new light. How does irony and satire work to make us feel like something is being done, when nothing is being done at all?
Unlike the Black Friday ads, which seem to fade into the past, Lady Dynamite will be here to stay and with it those Target placements. I guess they could digitally remove them but still, it debuted tattooed with Target. At best, it seems like a bad decision to still be promoting their brand after distancing from the company. At worst, it’s trying to fly under the radar, like subliminal advertising, and we aren’t supposed to be in on the joke.
Target Brand Placement
The Up&Up placement happens 4 times throughout the series. Even though they are window dressings, their placement seems to provide a totally new context to view certain scenes and the show itself. Let’s look at each one.
Placement 1: Friends (ep. 1). The first time we see Up&Up, Maria’s friends are arriving to help her with a project. We see both friends arrive holding identical paper cups. At first you see the logo partially obscured, but eventually you can clearly make out the distinctive rounded arrow of Up&Up on one of the cups. In the narrative, where did these characters get these cups? That doesn’t need to be answered by the show. But does your mind try to resolve that information unconsciously in some way? To me it seems like there are just two plausible origins. They’ve either brought them from home, which seems unlikely, or they’ve just come from Target. Whatever the answer, the brand is there when you meet the best friends.
Placement 2: The Audition (ep. 3). Episode 3 is the first of what I think of as the “Target Episodes.” There are a few episodes where Bamford’s relationship to the company is a major plot point. In this episode we see the development of the Crazy Shopper Lady (Christmas Champ) character for Checklist (Target). She auditions for the spot and as the audition wraps up her manager comes up to talk with her. The isles are filled with a mixture of branded and non-branded items but the last one you see before the end of the scene is Up&Up on some toilet paper behind the two. As the episode continues we see this audition moment as a plot device to help you understand the character’s motivation in the next scene. Bamford narrates that she has sold out but won’t sell out again.
Placement 3: The Vision Drawer (ep. 5). This placement veers on being embedded, meaning worked into the plot and emotion of the show. In this scene Maria meets someone who may be her dream man. He stumbles onto her “Vision Drawer” while walking through her home as a potential buyer. What’s a “Vision Drawer”? Well, according to Bamford, it’s a drawer that houses a collection of items that her ideal man would possess. Bamford’s potential dream man notices that he’s got the same cologne, same shirt, same love of Jack London and presumably Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. While he is pointing at the cologne the Up&Up product is right next to it on the left. The intentionality of this instance should make us pause and look at each placement more critically. The careful placement in the drawer and wishes of Maria feels a lot less like a mistake and a lot more like Madison Avenue style advertising.
Placement 4: Trabajito (ep. 7). At the opening of the episode we see a child worker, who looks Hispanic, bring Bamford’s agent a drink in a paper cup. This is the same type of paper cup we saw in the first episode, identical right down to the visible Up&Up brand. Whereas the previous Target placements seem to color the scenes they appear in, this one changes the scene completely once you know it’s there. Episode 7 is another Target themed episode. Maria makes an excursion into “jolly old Mejico” to volunteer in an attempt to assuage the guilt she feels from working for the company. During her time there she does voice work for Trabajito, a cartoon frog Checklist has created for it’s Mexican employees that remind them that “Trabajito is always watching” and “Trabajito never disobeys.” The appearance of Target in this episode seems heavy with meaning. The brown kid is literally placing the advertisement in the scene. Is the joke on him? What is Bamford trying to say here? Where does the irony stop? What are they trying to tell us about the paper cups?
What does it all mean?
So those are the Target placements. There’s actually over 100 more brands throughout the series, some placed many more times, but deciphering their meaning seems less straight-forward. With these four placements you could look at the whole show in a different way. One where it’s a hybrid of real life Maria mixed with the next iteration of the Christmas Champ. I’m not telling anyone how to read this comedy, but what I am looking for is someone to tell me what’s going on with these jokes. The anti-Target stuff is baked into the show and currently so are these Target product placements.
What are the producers winning with this trade-off? Is it some meta-commentary on “the biz”? If contractually they had to add these products couldn’t they have at least kept them out of the vision drawer? Did they have to open the Trabajito episode with the underage brown kid? Is this still just ironic racism? Is this the smartest comedy out there and I just don’t get it? Or, is it just another hustle?
