If, 10 years ago, you had told me that Cap’n Crunch just created a genuinely hilarious show that was nominated for multiple Primetime Emmys, it’s not that I wouldn’t have believed you, it’s that the sentence wouldn’t even have made sense. But, here we are.
Or, rather, that’s roughly where we’re at with The Earliest Show, which you can watch for free on Funny or Die’s website. The show was conceived when the marketing team behind Cap’n Crunch –yeah, this is about the the children’s’ cereal – approached some producers at the comedy website Funny or Die with a proposal: We’ll pay you to make a show that’s branded content for us, but we want to create it together.
“They wanted us to get the main talent first, and then build the creative in partnership with them,” Chris Bruss, president of digital at Funny or Die, told advertising magazine Adweek in June of 2016. “We’ve never really done that for a brand before. It was much more like how we would make a TV show, frankly.”
An everyday viewer wouldn’t necessarily notice the difference, except that the end result is profoundly weird and laugh-out-loud funny, and doesn’t have that same eye-rollingly overbearing brand placement that so often plagues what us media types call “native advertising.”
The main talent they found, who became the de facto show runner, is comedian Ben Schwartz. Schwartz tossed out an idea he’d been toying with for a while – a six-part web series about a corny daytime talk show host who proposes to his girlfriend on air, gets rejected and dumped on air, then spends each of the next five episodes embodying a different stage of grief. The cereal makes oddball appearances in adrenaline-pumped commercials, food segments gone awry and a few more standard placements. But it works, because the whole thing doesn’t feel forced – and when it does, the force is still funny.
‘This is how you do advertising in 2017. It’s organic, it’s endearing and it works’
Unless you’re into sketch comedy or know the name of every living Jewish comedian on TV, you probably wouldn’t recognize the name Ben Schwartz (unless you happen to know another Jewish guy with that name). This Ben Schwartz is best known for his role as Jean-Ralphio Saperstein – an occasionally recurring fan favourite on the erstwhile NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation – and making cameo appearances in the worlds of sketch and podcasting. He’s nimble, lithe and buoyant, typically typecast as someone’s douchey friend who’s hard to outright hate because of how undeniably cute he is.
But The Earliest Show is a breakthrough for him, not just because of how funny the show is, or how successful it was at organically promoting Cap’n Crunch (just look how many times I’ve mentioned it!), but because Schwartz and his costar Lauren Lapkus both earned Emmy nominations for best actor / actress in a short series – a nascent, two-year-old category created to acknowledge the quality of web series today.
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This is how you do advertising in 2017. It’s organic, it’s endearing and it works. It’s one of the best examples I’ve seen recently of branded content that fluidly slides into consumers’ normal habits – that is, watching dumb videos on Funny Or Die at midnight when you’re hankering for a snack.
To be clear, Schwartz probably won’t win the Emmy. (Based on a random audience poll by some awards-prediction site called Gold Derby, only 4 per cent of voters think he will.) But it’s a nomination well deserved, at least, both for the comedian’s ingenuity in creating this beast and his emotionally turbulent performance.
One second he’s inhabiting Jean-Ralphio’s zaniness; the next, he’s sweetly confiding his emotions, then he’s flippantly deriding the show’s producer in the middle of a segment. It’s a really cool acting challenge that no doubt boosts his bankable clout as leading-man material.
It’s only a matter of time before he’s starring in a rom-com opposite Zooey Deschanel. I wonder if he’ll be eating a bowl of Cap’n Crunch in any of the scenes.