Act Now: A Life of Infomercials

Like most kids, my sister and I relished the opportunity to wake up early on a Saturday morning and spend some quality time in front of the television. Unlike most kids, however, my sister and I typically ended up watching not animated tales of anthropomorphized animals chasing each other off cliffs, but good old American infomercials. For hours, we’d sit there, admiring the wonders of food dehydrators, suction bags that could transform your closet into a clutter-free zone, knives that could slash through metal, and exercise machines that could melt away fat in a matter of seconds. If a broadcast opened with “The following is a paid presentation,” we were probably going to spend the next 30 minutes watching. The thing is, we really weren’t all that interested in what these new-fangled, not-sold-in-stores creations could do.  We did, however, find the presentations of them to be utterly absurd and ridiculous. We would thus spend the duration of the program howling at the processed spectacle of modern commercialism. It was all great fun.

Over time, as we became seasoned connoisseurs of infomercials, their predictability became part of the humor of it. Like clockwork, payments would be slashed (“BUT WAIT…”), additional worthless goods would be tossed in the package if you called in the next 10 minutes, and there’d be a sloppy demonstration of ‘the old way of doing things.’ These ‘why go on living this way’ demonstrations were often shown in black-and-white, and contained perplexing happenings like lemon juice being inadvertently squirted in an unsuspecting woman’s eye or a cabinet full of Tupperware avalanching down on someone’s poor grandmother. 

The structure of these shows was also part of the entertainment. The old school infomercial conceit was the completely transparent trick that we were watching a ‘real TV show,’ some kind of regular program that you just happened to catch while flipping through to a find a Welcome Back, Kotter rerun. These faux shows featured a saccharine host (who was always oddly identified as a ‘famous TV personality,’ though I’ve yet to see one anywhere outside the parallel universe in which infomercials exist), replete with a diverse and ebullient audience who seemed just a bit too enamored of the item we were discussing. They would clap vigorously, gasp at incredible new features, and nod knowingly at their neighbors in utter amazement because holy cow, she just cooked a chicken in plastic bag in the microwave. Often, these presentations took the form of gradual discovery, as some inventor or ‘guest star’ would guide us to the light and the way (accessible exclusively through this new device). We would begin our journey like a naïve Magellan, embarking out towards the unknown. All we have is a problem (not enough time, too many unused bananas, too many pots on the stove), and then we’d find a simple new product to resolve this issue (an item impressive in its own right, no doubt). But over the course of the half hour, we would uncover an endless array of features, bells, whistles, and would then be offered a lengthy line of cookbooks, starter kits, dish towels, coupon packets— just about everything under the kitchen sink. And then we’d learn, like spying new land in the distance that could not possibly exist, that the whole package was, by some act of a higher power, a “$200 value for only 3 easy payments of $29.99.”

As long as I’ve been alive, infomercials have been to American television what Fergie has been to the Black Eyed Peas—I know that it existed beforehand, but I shudder to think what that time must have been like. Thanks to the deregulation of commercial content over the air during the 1980s, the infomercial business took off in the mid-90s and has continued to grow and evolve to this day. Though the infomercial has changed a great deal since those halcyon days of the 90s, the general concept has remained the same: we get the opportunity to reach well-beyond the average 30-second spot to learn the ins-and-outs of some of today’s most history-altering products. The standard bearer in this field has been and will likely always be Ron Popeil and his “set it, and forget it!” Showtime rotisserie oven—one amongst a large arsenal of inventions Popeil developed. As soon as my sister and I saw Popeil’s name appear on the black title screen, our spirits would rise, and our minds would race to consider what new device Ron had in store for us today. In a world full of glossy and generic faces, Ron felt like the kindly avuncular figure down the street who tinkered with gadgets in his garage and was just so delighted that you’d asked to see what he’d been working on. The programs on which his products were featured contained all the best and most entertaining elements of infomercials—the overly enthused host, a crowd bursting with excitement, price slashing, revelations of the highest order, call-and-response shouting—it was basically like an easy-to-digest tent revival. All infomercials that came after have been judged against Popeil’s work. In the time since, sadly, few have come close to reaching that lofty ideal.

The other day, I had the pleasure of partaking in what may be the last of the great infomercials. It was a presentation of the Magic Bullet (a device my sister has actually ordered, I might add). This program is centered on the totally plausible idea that a British* man and his purported wife have invited some neighbors over for the sole purpose of demonstrating how unbelievable this little food preparation gizmo is (Spoiler Alert: it’s basically an unnecessarily small blender that you can put in the microwave). The houseguests, gathered round the kitchen like eager scouts at a campfire, gush with mouths agape and eyes wide over the fact we can make chicken salad in six seconds, then turn around and whip up a fluffy chocolate mousse in less time than it takes to say “Type II diabetes.” (NOTE: I calculated, and at the rate these folks were cranking out food, you could make some 600 new dishes in an hour—a pretty impressive feat). Though our hosts are quite amiable, it’s the gathered neighbors that are the most entertaining characters in this piece (just as the audience in the old Popeil infomercials was always the reason you watched). There’s a grumpy doubting Thomas in our midst, not sold on what his friends are serving. There’s a seemingly strung-out lady who comes over with cigarette in hand (with ash a mile long) and disheveled hair, donning a nightgown (who does that?). But by the end of the show, once everyone has been plied with nachos and frozen drinks, the skeptics among us are stamped out, and we arrive at the inevitable conclusion that, yes, this really is indeed the ‘ultimate party machine.’ We’ve all learned an important lesson here today, though I cannot exactly say what that that lesson is.

I have attempted fruitlessly to derive meaning from all the hours spent watching infomercials throughout my life. In all that time, I have ordered exactly one product—a speed reading kit that I asked for when I was not yet old enough to call in. I quickly learned to my chagrin that the cassette tapes the kit contained mostly discussed how to alter your diet to speed up mental processes (not a convincing argument to the chicken nugget fiend I then was). So, if I wasn’t interested in purchasing anything, why should I spend so much time watching protracted advertisements? To me, infomercials occupy a weird alternate universe built upon layers of canned absurdity and bastardized reality. Everything feels like it’s on the verge of descending into a maddening hell (see what happens to Ellen Burstyn’s character in Requiem for a Dream, for example), yet it also seems not all that distant from what we know of the world. There is a kind of magical allure to a place in which everyone is enthusiastically trying to peddle something amazing to you with a smile that’s a bit too wide. It’s a Pleasantville-esque planet where everything is gee whiz, so exciting and fascinating and simple. The humor comes in the fact that someone is trying to pass off gussied-up consumerism as real life and think they are getting away with it. I’m sure it made us feel smart, my sister and I, to sit there as kids and think we were sharp enough to see the man hiding behind the screen. In another light, infomercials are a distillation of what makes contemporary life so frustrating and weird—having to constantly separate the authentic from what someone is trying to sell you. These programs confound this process that in a way that is impossibly hilarious to me. So if liking infomercials makes me a weirdo, then so be it. They're still better than Jersey Shore.

*Americans must have some keen propensity to mindlessly trust whatever comes out of a British person’s mouth—they are inordinately represented in infomercials, though I rarely see them on this side of the pond in real life.