YOUR SHOW OF SHILLS

By LESLIE SAVAN

WHAT WERE those hokey dancing taco-and-bell doing on the premiere of Dana Carvey's new comedy show two weeks ago--was this a plug or a parody of lead sponsor Taco Bell? It was hard to tell as the fast-food duo sang, "We're paying him a fortune to use our name, 'cause he's a shameless whore!"

In fact, this was an odd TV moment when parody and plug became one. The Taco Bell Dana Carvey Show was intended to be an ironic resurrection of 1950s-style brand-name TV shows like The Lux Video Theatre or The U.S. Steel Hour. The deal originally struck between ABC and Pepsico, Taco Bell's parent company, was that each week a different member of the Pepsi family would serve as "both title and target" for Carvey's wry satire, positioning the sponsor as quite the cool dude for rope-a-doping a few edgy punches.

But maybe it sounded better on paper. Taco Bell pulled out of future Carvey shows the day after the premiere, though the company wouldn't say whether it objected to the ribald skits (which included a prosthetically enhanced President Clinton breast-feeding animals) or the darts aimed at the ad business. ABC quickly promised to tame the show, and Pepsico decided to limit sponsorship to its less familial, more attitude-seeking brands, and thus was born last week's somewhat safer episode, The Mug Root Beer Dana Carvey Show.

Whatever its fate (or name), the Carvey show illustrates the increasingly blurred line between programming and ads on network television. Of course, the ad-driven medium has never been a pristine art form, its practitioners not generally averse to bending over backward to please sponsors. But lately, advertising's osmotic bleed into entertainment has turned into an arterial gush. Murphy Brown wrote John F. Kennedy Jr. into a script so he could promote his magazine, George; Diet Coke hired the writers and producers of Friends to create a mini episode-cum-ad starring the entire cast; and, most famously, Elizabeth Taylor spritzed her way through four CBS sitcoms in a single night last month--including Murphy Brown, again--to push her new fragrance, Black Pearls.

No network has indulged more aggressively in this kind of stunt than Fox. As part of a complex $1 million package deal last fall that included a viewer contest, Fox had a character on its Party of Five ask, "Got milk?"--the tag line for the multimillion-dollar America's Dairy Farmers' ad campaign. In a similar marketing scheme, Dr. Dre spouted AT&T's "Know the code" on New York Undercover. The upcoming Mother's Day episode of Living Single will top that for MCI when a character calls mom by dialing 1-800-COLLECT. "Whatever we do, we try to look for a natural integration with a show," says Fox senior vice president Doug Binzak. "Our main concern is to make sure viewers don't feel everything is overcommercialized."

Viewers, however, may no longer know what it means to be overly commercial. Polaroid has gone so far as to buy ads within ads, sponsoring the networks' own promotional trailers. Recent spots for upcoming shows--from Fox's Melrose Place to this Thursday's entire NBC lineup--begin and end with the new Polaroid slogan, "See what develops," and the company's logo. Meanwhile, some of the world's largest advertisers are simply starting up their own sitcoms. In a partnership with Paramount TV, Procter & Gamble is now airing Home Court on NBC and, on CBS, Almost Perfect and Good Company. The latter show is set at an ad agency where copywriters spent most of one episode ridiculing a "toilet paper with baking soda"--a product actually sold by P&G rival Scott Paper. While P&G also owns several long-running daytime soap operas, the baking soda gibe is the sort of "product message" (a.k.a. advertisement) that gains mileage and legitimacy when slipped sub rosa into a prime-time showcase. (P&G swears that all creative decisions are Paramount's.)

The phenomenon of sponsor-owned shows in the 1950s began to fade when advertisers realized they could better reach a target market by spreading their ad budget across many shows rather than by socking it into one. But that's not so easy in a world of 500 channels and ever more "new media" outlets. "There's more competition in the marketplace," says Cheryl Kroyer, director of media services at Polaroid's ad agency, Goodby, Silverstein & Partners. So advertisers who can afford it are going back to sheer, unavoidable visibility--and there are few things more visible than the Church Lady dancing with a life-size taco. Kroyer notes that the networks have powerful economic reasons for getting ever cozier with advertisers. "With more networks and TV channels chasing the same dollars, [TV executives] are willing to give more than just basic airtime for 30-sec. ads."

Do the writers, actors and producers who must do their sponsors' bidding feel used? Not necessarily. Carvey says the parody- as-plug idea was his. "It was just kind of boring to call it The Dana Carvey Show," he says. "The idea came off of sports shows like the Doritos Cotton Bowl." Actually, it was the Mobil Cotton Bowl, so maybe in-show product placement isn't as effective as advertisers hope. At any rate, Carvey isn't quite the "whore" his show alleges. Though Pepsico pays ABC extra for the special treatment, "if they were paying me more, I wouldn't do it," Carvey says, adding that he okayed the deal only after Pepsico "agreed to have no input into the show."

After winning its Tuesday-night time slot on its first outing, Carvey's show slipped to third place last week--though he still scored No. 1 with the coveted market of men ages 18 to 49. Many of them are in that key demographic group that likes to think of itself as ad resistant. But for these cynics with disposable income, advertisers have been devising below-the-radar approaches for years, come-ons that are harder to detect and resist than dancing tacos or Liz galumphing through The Nanny. These are all the rebel ads and anti-ad ads of recent vintage, from former "underground" beat poet/heroin addict William Burroughs flacking for Nike to Sprite's "Image Is Nothing" campaign that attacks advertising as a bunch of lies; from the spot that insists buying an Audi is "a declaration which screams out 'I will not wallow in conformity'" to the bad-boy "Do the Dew" ads for Mountain Dew. These ads are aimed squarely at Carvey's "countercultural" audience, as he's called it--not coincidentally, Mountain Dew is his next title sponsor. Rather than spoof an advertising form that really doesn't exist anymore, Carvey might find more stinging satiric subject matter in ads that shamelessly flatter his audience, telling them they're too hip to be sold to.

Wouldn't that be special?