Wishing a Plague on Comcast Town

There are few media-related things that irritate me more than television commercials. To avoid them, I watch everything through a TiVo buffer, and hit the "mute" button on the remote when watching "in real time" (e.g., baseball, news, the Battlestar Galactica finale). This is odd to some people, but I've been doing it for years and years. In the days before TiVo, I would videotape programs and watch them an hour later just to blast through the commercials. I'm exposed to enough advertising every single day, so any little bit I can avoid provides a bit of serenity.

Now, I'm also not a huge fan of Comcast, the local cable monopoly provider. They are expensive, sometimes technically wonky, have less-than-good customer service, and often creepy contracted home technicians. Furthermore, since I work/live in Philadelphia, I'm constantly exposed to the architectural eyesore of their new HQ, the "Comcast Tower". (Although, truthfully they do have some interesting art and video walls inside the building.) However, until Verizon wires more neighborhoods withFiOS, Comcast is what we're stuck with if we want to watch television on a physical television.

Combine my dislikes of television commercials and Comcast, and you get an intense loathing for their new ad campaign, "Comcast Town", a mashup of animation and live actors. The residents of "Comcast Town" all wear disturbing, dead-eyed looks while they sing directly at the camera, detailing what's so great about Comcast services. It's unnerving, as if they've had their personalities removed and replaced with corporate-speak. It particularly annoys me that one of the "residents" walks past a shuttered building that magically turns into a record store. Aren't digital downloads (legally purchased or illegally swiped) putting record stores out of business? If Comcast is promoting its fast-loading cable internet service, shouldn't the commercial show a record store going out of business instead?

The annoyance of the visuals in "Comcast Town" commercials pales in comparison to the audio track, an original song performed in the flat, twee, "charmingly childlike" style of Kimya Dawson. While I'm usually willing to give most styles of indie music a chance, this twee shit has got to die a quick and painful death. Immediately. It was somewhat avoidable when it was limited to "quirky" movies like Juno, but now that it's moved into major corporate commercials, I fear this style will start spreading and other companies will adopt it.

When these "Comcast Town" commercials come on and I'm unlucky enough to be watching in real time, and unable to find the remote quickly, I run screaming from the room, stuffing a cat in my ears. What's worse is that the twee song is now being used on the news-traffic-weather radio station, the one commercial station I ever listen to at all. Driving into a traffic jam is preferable to having to endure these commercials.

Give me Swedish death metal, bad contemporary country, throat singing, static, anything else.

JUST MAKE THE TWEE STOP. (And bring FiOS to my block, too.)

(Note: See the commercial and C+ "Ad Report Card" here.)