almost-anonymous consumption
In an earlier post, I praised the FX comedy “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” for doing a decent job of representing life in the city, but one of tonight’s episodes, “The Gang Runs for Office” had an erroneous detail that I thought was worth commenting on. In this episode, the gang convinces Dennis to run for South Philly District 37 Comptroller in an effort to scam his opponent into bribing him. In one scene, Mac walks in on Charlie shooting Dennis with a cheap consumer camcorder and asks what’s going on. Charlie tells Mac, “we’re going to shoot a commercial and get it on public access.” Alarm bells went off in my head because Philadelphia is the largest city in the country without a public access system. If the show were written by people in New York or LA, I might forgive this error, but much of the purported charm of the show is that it was created by people from Philadelphia, a city often off the cultural radar. This mistake strikes me as particularly strange because the show started as an amateur project distributed online. Did the creators never look into producing a public access show?
Despite this lapse, I do enjoy the show for its references to life in the City of Brotherly Shove. The characters often refer to “the Wawa,” and I often wonder if a national audience understands from the context. Wawa is a chain of convenience stores found throughout the Delaware Valley, well, except in black neighborhoods. One thing that distinguishes Wawa from a 7-11 is that in addition to selling soda, cigarettes, and the normal convenience store items, each store has a deli offering hoagies and cold cuts. Although I thought Wawa paled in comparison to the Tulsa-based QuikTrip chain, many Philadelphians seem very fond of Wawa. In this week’s New York Times Magazine Rob Walker writes about customer loyalty to Wawa. According to a recent study by an Ohio State University professor, customers flock to Wawa for the friendly service. I frankly preferred shooting the breeze with Grego at my corner bodega, but Wawa even has a dedicated following online. Walker notes that the We Love Wawa LiveJournal group has about 950 members, and MySpace has a similarly large community. In this context, I suppose it makes sense for “Sunny” to talk about Wawa, but gloss over media access issues.
