In Defense of Redheads

I am absolutely horrified by these Verizon FIOS commercials, and I can't just sit by silently any more.

In this commercial, the loser cable guy discovers that everyone who cancelled his service has subsequently signed up with Verizon FIOS. In another commercial, the loser cable guy visits an ex-customer to lure him back. Naturally, the Verizon guy is there. FIOS offers a hundred channels and a $150 rebate, he says. What can the loser cable guy offer? A stick of gum and a bus pass.

Verizon has only sixty seconds to get their message across, so every detail is important. Their representative is smart but not smug, young and hip, with the tousled brown hair of the guy next door.

The competitor? Oversized, bumbling, and redhaired.

Now, in a perfect world we wouldn't have to worry about what our good guys and bad guys looked like. We'd have good guys who wore lederhosen, and good guys who wore fezes, and good guys who wore sassy caftans. But the fact is, TV doesn't cast blindly. Advertisers think we'll identify with people who look like us, which means the protagonists are usually dark-haired and Caucasian. And so we'll take an instant dislike to their competitors, they won't look quite like us.

Have we learned anything at all in a hundred years of fighting for equality? Barely, it seems. Sure, this company wouldn't think of putting a black man or a Hispanic man in the same position. They wouldn't think of slapping a yarmulke on the loser cable guy. Then why is it okay to portray a dude as an idiot just because his parents had sex during a forest fire, and his sweat smells like pumpkin pie?

So, I'd like to take this opportunity to tell Verizon that this looks-based discrimination is unacceptable. Shame! I say. Shame for perpetuating the myth that different means bad. Shame for saying that a man is a loser just because his pubic hair glows in the dark. And I long for the day when we won't be able to distinguish TV's heroes from villains, and even God's oddest children are accepted into one loving fold of humanity, whether or not they fart Cheetos.