With its formally attired hosts and song-and-dance numbers, NBC’s Maya & Marty deliberately hearkens back to the variety shows of yesteryear. But the show, which premiered Tuesday night, also gives us a glimpse of television’s future: one where advertisements are as likely to show up in the middle of a show as during the commercial breaks.
In an opening sketch called “The Astronaut,” Maya Rudolph played a woman who bids a tearful farewell to her space-faring husband, only to find out that his five-year mission is really an elaborate ruse to get some uninterrupted guy time. That the fledgling show snagged Tom Hanks to play the astronaut was a casting coup, but the bigger coup was that, in the course of the sketch, Hanks was shown watching Chicago Fire (another NBC show) on his iPhone and scarfing down Burger King chicken fries, which he mentioned by name.
Product integration, which is what the industry calls it when products play an important part of the scene rather than simply appearing in a shot, is hardly a new phenomenon. But with TV viewers fast-forwarding through ads or watching on streaming platforms that eliminate them altogether, it’s increasingly how TV networks will be paying their bills. Tom Hanks hasn’t done a commercial, except for charitable causes, in years, but getting one of the world’s biggest movie starts to interact with your products on screen is just as good as, if not better than, a straightforward ad.
Lorne Michaels produced Maya & Marty, and Saturday Night Live is also planning to cut down on commercial airtime—by 30 percent, or two full ad breaks, in its upcoming fall season. That might seem like a counterintuitive move when ad revenues, which are tied to TV viewership, are dropping, but the idea is to increase the value of the ads that remain by making sure live viewers don’t surf away, and to make up the shortfall by giving advertisers a chance to work with the show’s writers and generate SNL-themed content of their own. NBC has been vague on the details, but Maya & Marty gave us a glimpse of how it might work. In addition to the Hanks tie-in, the broadcast featured an ad for laundry detergent starring Rudolph, and several more featuring current and former SNL players. The lines between sketch comedy and salesmanship were so blurry it wouldn’t have been surprising if the edible diamonds that Rudolph’s Melania Trump spent several minutes hawking turned out to be a real product. (They’re not.)
In a sense, TV has come full circle, returning to the days when sponsors would regularly vet scripts and hosts would stop the show to put in a quick plug for Ovaltine or Ipana. But the reason product integration is so valuable is that it doesn’t look like advertising: It’s much more effective if it seems like Vin Diesel’s character in the Fast and the Furious movies likes Corona because it’s cool, not because some bottling conglomerate paid Universal a boatload of money to determine his choice of brew. If Maya & Marty is any indication, there are still a lot of kinks to be worked out before this particular marriage of art and commerce feels like anything but a shotgun wedding.
