Thank you for not sucking

I enjoyed P&G’s sequel to the Mom commercial (http://youtu.be/57e4t-fhXDs). I thought Weiden did a decent job of living up to the first “Thank you, Mom” spot.

            The thing was, afterwards, I wondered if it was genuine. It had nothing to do with the commercial. The commercial didn’t do anything wrong – it made me laugh at the kids falling on their wee little bums and that left me vulnerable to the sweet mother/daughter ending. And it’s so wonderfully scored. It’s just that when an ad attempts to capture something timeless, especially if it is warm and fuzzy, you have to wonder if it is falling into what the writer, Simon Reynolds calls “retromania.” Were the creative folks tapping into June-Cleaver-mom kitsch or were they really sincere?

            Though I came to the conclusion that they were sincere, why was I suspicious? It was like I had been listening to the Boy Who Cried Wolf, someone who had deceived me so many times that there was little chance he was being straight with me. This is, after all, the age of tropes, memes, brands, jingles, mash ups, canned reactions, market-tested flavors, sequels and prequels and whatever you want to call those things we pass for original expression. It’s the age where, rather than invent the next Sherlock, we have the tech geek Sherlock (Cumberbatch), a comic book Sherlock (Downey Jr.) and a drug addict New Yorker Sherlock (Miller) who has a hot Asian fashion plate as Dr. Watson (Lui). Personally, I’m waiting for the Food Network Sherlock to uncover the mysteries of a good tomato sauce, but that’s neither here nor there. Everything is either a work of nostalgia or a reboot.
             But Moms are still Moms and they still feel Mom stuff. And to quote George Carlin, “Scratch any cynic and you will find a disappointed idealist.” All it takes is a little originality to appreciate something familiar and a firm belief that we skeptics and cynics and nihilists have feelings, too.