As a cord-cutter who mostly consumes television through streaming services and by occasionally using my parent’s cable log-in information, I manage to avoid a lot of commercials. However, a couple times a year, I indulge in some live television and it’s almost always for a major awards show. Usually, during these brief excursions into broadcast television territory, I bemoan the fact that I am forced to sit through long commercial breaks. However, last night, during the Emmys, there was one commercial that actually had me laughing out loud, making up for all the other moments I wasted watching the same ads over and over. Ironically, the ad was for Netflix and a new crop of stand-up specials the streaming platform will soon released with some of the biggest names in comedy, including Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle, Chris Rock, and Ellen DeGeneres.
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In case you missed the commercial, which is entirely possible if you're a Netflix/Hulu-only kind of gal, it starts with clips from what very well might be some of your favorite shows: The Crown, Orange Is The New Black, Stranger Things, and House Of Cards. Then, those funny folk begin to pop up in a few of the iconic scenes from the Netflix original series. For instance, when Piper climbs up on Litchfield's cafeteria table to protest in OITNB, Chris Rock appears beside her and aks, "Ladies, doesn't it bother you that you're in here and O.J.'s walkin' the streets?" Besides just that, Chapelle shows up in the world of Stranger Things, Ellen confronts Winston Churchill about his bad breath in The Crown, and Seinfeld does one of his signature bits about mundane topics like phone calls while riding in the Presidential motorcade with Frank Underwood from House Of Cards.
After all of these clips with their laugh-out-loud additions, the commercial closes with each of the comics' names and the announcement that there is new stand-up coming to Netflix, and if this ad is any indicator, the forthcoming specials are going to be very funny. At the end of it all, the tagline "Netflix is a joke" appears, which may signal that the streaming platform is now pushing to feature even more comedy, specifically stand-up specials from some of our favorite comedians. The ad finally answers all the questions we've had since "Netflix is a joke" billboards were put up in Los Angeles and New York a few weeks ago. And to think, if it weren't for the Emmys, I could have missed it.
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