I do not understand: A Letter

Dear Bart Durham: (For those of you not in the Nashville area, Bart Durham is an injury lawyer in town. If you watch local TV stations for 10 minutes, you’re sure to see a commercial. Which leads me to the rest of this letter . . . . )

For the life of me, I can’t understand why you’re listening to whomever is helping you come up with commercial ideas. Yes, your current series of commercials are entertaining, and people do pay attention to them, but FOR ALL THE WRONG REASONS.

Because really, we laugh at them. A lot.

Back in the far away days when I first moved to Nashville, the “plot” of your commercials actually had to do with the facts of the case you were discussing. If it was a lawsuit involving getting damages from a car accident on the interstate, you showed a car accident on the interstate. If it was a workman’s comp claim, you showed the person working.

But those days seem so long ago. Lately, we’ve had a guy asking a woman to marry him on the first date while a female voice over says that you won a case for her and she received a lot of money in damages. Honestly, I felt sorry for her because if getting that money somehow made it possible for her to go on this horrendous date with the loser guy, I’m sure she’d rather not have it. Then there’s the haunted house and ghost hunting commercials you pull out in the fall, in which there are also voice overs about a case, but the action in the commercial has NOTHING to do with what’s happening on screen. And for awhile, there was that serialized soap opera you had going on in your commercials that, I hate to tell you, was just dumb.

Basically it boils down to this: I can find no logical link between the voice overs and the actual action that takes place in your commercials. And more and more, the plot of the commercials seem based in some alternate reality that makes them downright mockable to the real people of the world.

Very Confused in Nashville, Mandy