Thank You For Smoking!

In the satirical film Thank You for Smoking (2005), a marketing exec for the smoking industry goes out to Hollywood to meet with a big time producer, who agrees to provide two top bill actors in a futuristic movie who will smoke on camera. The film was a brilliant send up of corporate influence, DC cynicism and corruption and the marketing/advertising industry in particular. But low and behold, a few years later the cable station SyFy took that idea and included it in a new series Caprica (2010). The show was a prequel to Battlestar Gallactica, set 58 years in the past. I found it to be a great show and was thus not surprised when it was cancelled near the end of the first season. What did surprise me as I watched it was the amount of smoking that the characters engaged in. It was beyond a few cigs to show moments of stress or character development, the main adult characters were smoking all the time. And then it occurred to me that the tobacco industry must be paying them to do this -- as why would they have characters in the future making such poor health decision, particularly when the show seemed to be aimed not only at the stereotypical older, balding single male but also teenagers.

But Caprica was not alone. Two shows on AMC and a third on Netflix also had characters smoking at an alarming rate. Mad Men is, of course, set in the early 60s when people were still smoking with reckless abandon. And while the show did touch on the new advertising strategies being used to retain and lure new smokers even as new evidence was emerging of their dangers, it also included a hell of a lot of smoking by a bunch of really attractive actors and actresses. The producers of the show could argue that it was merely television verite, but can we really believe that? And what of the show The Killing, set in a gritty Seattle? Sure, the cops probably smoke there but did they need to do it so much on screen? Finally is the new straight-to-Internet series House of Cards, where characters seem to go out of their way to smoke on camera -- with many episodes beginning and ending with the two main characters, Francis Underwood (Kevin Spacey) and his wife Claire (Robin Wright) at the window sill of their beautiful Georgetown townhouse smoking away. 

All four of the shows, in my estimation, are great television. But being cable shows, even the award-winning Mad Men appears starved for money, particularly given AMC's infamous parsimony. So are they being paid by tobacco companies? It's hard to know. Though I've done some light research, there is no clear answer. But having sexy young actors and actresses smoking, or even older ones, certainly plays a part in making smoking cool again. In fact, if one looks at many indie films, there still seems to be a cache to smoking that goes all the way back to the 50s. If the shows are being paid, legally or under the table, it is something the FCC should look into, given that tobacco ads have been illegal on TV for some time now. Of course, one could argue that it simply serves our fantasy relationship to TV and movies and we don't actually have to light up to enjoy watching others do so. Even if that is the case, which I doubt, it certainly does perk up that desire to spark up the second the show ends.