Last week, prompted by what appeared to be a product integration plot on The Middle that was aimed at boosting the desirability of the iPad, the New Yorker’s television critic Emily Nussbaum laid out a useful distinction between “props (placement) and integration (paid scripted plots.)” I’ve always said that I’m relatively comfortable with television shows, particularly low-rated but beloved ones that are looking to stay alive by tightening their budgets, by striking some deals with corporate sponsors, either for casual product placement, or for the kind of very transparent, self-aware product integration deals that Subway struck with both Chuck and Community. I think I’m somewhat more tolerant than Emily of the idea that my television programs will try to sell me things, if only because I think it’s a self-limiting form of minor evil. There are only so many times per season you can get away with a plot that involves trying to sell me a product, but an infinite number of times you can try to sell me on many other rotten ideas that have a much greater impact than the purchase of computer electronics.

That said, we’re seeing the rise of a very different kind of product integration in popular culture that’s bumping up against my sense of comfort. Increasingly, we’re starting to see shows and movies where product integration isn’t incidental—it’s the frame for the entire product. And it’s selling companies, rather than discrete products.

First, there was CBS’s attempt to put together a show based at Groupon, the online coupon dealer. Now, Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are starring in a movie, The Internship in which they’re interns at Google:

The CBS show didn’t come through, but both it and The Internship have as their premise the idea that the companies where they’re set are innovative, dynamic places full of interesting, admirable people (30 Rock at least sold NBC and GE as not-even-hot messes). Groupon would have been the star of a television show precisely at the point when its daily deal business model was coming under question, as it and competitors like Living Social ran out of companies willing to participate for the first time, and for companies willing to reup after their first experiences. It’s absolutely true that Google has incredible office space—I’ve visited the ones here in DC, which are deeply enviable—but there’s much more to the company than that. Loyalty to an entire company is much, much more valuable to an organization than loyalty to a single product: Apple, and increasingly Amazon are examples of how profitable it can be to lock in a customer for an entire range of their needs, rather than for one of them. And encouraging us to become attached to corporations (as if they were, say, people) may also be a way of encouraging us to look less closely that those companies have, whether it’s the environmental toll of Apple products or labor issues in Amazon’s fulfillment chain.

In other words, it’s a win-win for companies who can sell themselves as settings to Hollywood. It’s a good deal for movie or television productions that can get substantial subsidies by setting shows and movies in corporations. But for me, it’s a decided bridge too far.

Over at Forbes, Adam Thierer ponders whether we could see a return to a model where companies sponsored entire shows or blocks of television, rather than networks selling ads to a bunch of different companies piecemeal throughout an hour or half-hour—especially in an era when consumers are increasingly fast-forwarding ads or skipping them entirely. While audiences certainly don’t like ads, whether becuase they break up storytelling or because they’re insipid, there’s no question that they’d probably like the alternatives to advertising support a lot less, whether that results in higher cable fees, higher iTunes purchase prices, or higher Netflix and Hulu subscriptions. Sponsorships could be less intrusive and could provide coherent framing to an episode of television, and could generate a great deal of good will for a brand if it’s seen to be keeping a show alive.

To a certain extent, Subway’s already done this with Chuck and with product placement in Community. And that brand’s work with NBC’s quirkier shows with more loyal fan bases raises an interesting question: how would such sponsorships work in a way that’s both good for programming and good for the companies that are buying in? Product placement can, of course, end up being more of a limitation than a help. It’s lovely to have a company provide cars for your characters, of course, but it can become awfully irksome if you want to tell a story about a car crash, and the company threatens to pull the cars if they’re shown crashing, crashed, or even if they’re stated to have crashed. An overly rigid approach to corporate and creative synergy can stifle storytelling and end up meaning we see less of the product on-screen.

Subway’s involvement in Chuck and Community, by contrast, always demonstrated an ability to be self-deprecating and a little obvious. On Community, the brand was willing to be the bad guy in aspiring small business owner Shirley’s fight to open up a sandwich shop in the Greendale Community College Cafeteria. The show didn’t have to disparage the sandwiches themselves, which were always implied to be a reasonable if corporate competitor, to use Subway as a specter of disappointment to a character. Similarly with Chuck, Subway’s presence was winking, a bit of placement that felt more like a compact between the company and the fans than two giant corporations.

If sponsorships become a popular model, I’m sure brands will be lining up to form affiliations with the biggest shows like Two and a Half Men and Two Broke Girls. But that’s actually missing the point. If companies want synergy and real, long-term relationships with the fan bases of shows, they need to shop around and pick programming that fits their sensibilities, and where getting what they want out of the relationship doesn’t cause harm to the show in the process. Buying a sponsorship is all about buying goodwill, and that means surprising an audience with the level or nature of your support for a show. It’s the rare situation where selling soap and making art could be well-aligned fo the companies that try to get sponsorship right.

I’ve written in qualified defense of product placement in the past, arguing that when it’s used to subsidize repetitive competition shows or to prop up low-rated but quality programming where the audience is aware that product placement is ongoing, there’s no real damage to the creative integrity of a program. But switching up Bond’s martini for a Heineken in Skyfall, the next installment of the storied franchise, is going too far.

First, it would be hard to make the case that adding a Heineken sponsorship is actually necessary to help the production cut costs or make some sort of margin. The Bond franchise may be the most reliable product in moviegoing history, resistant to downturns, odd plots, and dreadful names—Quantum of Solace made just $5 million less than the far superior Casino Royale. Unless Sam Mendes, who is directing Skyfall, is doing something truly bizarre with the movie, there’s probably no particular need to lock in a little margin to ensure that everything will be okay.

Second, this is a case where Bond’s original product choice actually matters—the scene where he comes up with the particular formula for it in Casino Royale is all about the delight a self-made man takes in tweaking the conventions and the formulas of the class he’s joined. That Bond drinks his martini shaken not stirred, and therefore slightly weaker, is a nice little chink in his masculine armor because it means he’s drinking a weaker cocktail (shaking makes the ice melt faster and dilutes the drink). Characters’ tastes can be and often are arbitrary in popular culture, but Bond’s are carefully curated and a very important projection of his personality that helps provide continuity from one actor to the next. Turning him into a Heineken drinker is a betrayal.

More to the point, why does it have to be Bond quaffing the brewski? If Felix Leiter is back—and one has to hope he will be given how wonderful Jeffrey Wright’s been in the role of Bond’s American counterpart—why not have him knock back a beer while Bond drinks his martini? You’d still get the positive association, and you could get it in a way that tweaks Bond’s martini-drinking a bit, plays up the difference between American and British styles. That actually seems like it would be smarter, and more self-aware. And one of the things that’s made Subway’s product placement in recent years so successful is that it acknowledges that the audience is fully aware of what they’re doing and what they’re trying to achieve. It’s less about building desire for the product and more about generally positive associations for the brand, something that’s more sophisticated, but much more fun for viewers. Bond can be deadly serious, but as Casino Royale showed, he’s more fun when he’s aware of his own affectations, pretentions, and self-defense mechanisms. Heineken and Mendes might want to take a lesson.

This post contains spoilers through the March 29 episode of Community.

It was, of course, tragic that Community went on a long hiatus if only for the show’s prospects and for our collective enjoyment. But who knew that the show’s long absence from airways denied us a hilarious sitcom riff on Mitt Romney’s declaration in Iowa last summer that “corporations are people, my friend.” Because it’s hard to imagine a show other than Community where an actual personification of a corporation—in this case, a hunky blond named Subway who wants to open a non-profit shelter for disabled animals, reads 1984, and pushes all of Britta Perry’s buttons—would walk jauntily onto the scene. Especially at a time when the show’s deepest friendship is in the middle of a reassessment.

Subway’s appearance on the show is a continuation of the plot that began with Community‘s return: Shirley wanted to own a sandwich shop, but the Dean circumvented her by welcoming a Subway franchise onto campus. Subway (the person) is a way of getting around the Greendale bylaw that requires any on-campus business to be 51-percent student owned. It’s terrific not only for Community to get a chance to make a bid for some of the product placement money liberated by the end of Chuck‘s run on NBC, but for Britta to get a truly entertaining love interest who wasn’t part of the main cast. Britta gets a bad rap for being a buzz-kill, but I appreciate the show acknowledging that it may only be within the disastrous dynamics of the study group that she’s a bore, and there’s a place where her passion is a better fit, and where there’s someone who shares her values and is available for gratifyingly kinky sex.

In keeping with, though in a much more veiled key, I thought it was a nice touch that, as Troy and Abed are facing serious problems in their friendship, Air Conditioning Repair School Dean Laybourne showed up to drive a wedge between them along the lines of their aspirations. Community‘s done a nice job of suggesting that blue-collar jobs can be not just legitimately rewarding but a calling and an art as high as filmmaking. And Laybourne sought to divide his prized target student from his best friends by playing with that idea. To Troy, he implies that Inspector Spacetime and Abed don’t have sufficient respect for Constable Reggie and Troy, that they devalue the work and creativity of the world’s journeymen. And Laybourne exploited Abed’s elitism and nerdery, suggesting that Constable Reggie—and Troy—are a drag on Inspector Spacetime’s wild adventurism and creative spirit.

And if this does escalate to full-scale war, I’m Team Troy and Team Blanket Fort. As much as it’s probably time for Abed to learn some realistic life skills and to experience some failures, it’s also probably time for Troy, now that his friendship with Abed has liberated him from jerky jockdom, to figure out an identity that’s more authentically his own.

It turns out that poor, pokey NBC, home of much beloved, wildly creative sitcoms like Community and Parks and Recreation, is the network most willing to trade product placement for financial support for its shows. And while I suppose I should be up in arms about the marching corporatization of our entertainment, I can’t say that the supposed evils of product placement are at the top of my list.

First, there’s a difference between using product placement to make already-cheap shows cheaper, as is the case with reality television as NBC does with The Biggest Loser and The Celebrity Apprentice, and using product placement to subsidize quality but low-rated programming as NBC has done with Friday Night Lights and Chuck. Using donated products to carry out the same repetitive rituals doesn’t actually make the formula of a predictable competition show any more predictable, or the emotional arc of the show any less manufactured. And the small but dedicated audiences for those other kinds of shows are aware enough to recognize artifice when they see it, and to appreciate that they’re enjoying something that’s been kept alive by something other than pure audience size. Better Chuck with the Subway references than no Chuck at all, I guess.

More to the point, the assumption that characters wouldn’t use brands and talk about products actually runs counter to reality. We all have irrational brand loyalties, and talk about products, and recommend stuff to each other. It’s not some dramatic distortion of the universe of the show, as long as the characters aren’t Amish or live in a socialist future, for characters to talk about the things they buy and why they like them.

And finally, for the most part, we’re not dumb. People know what product integration is, and that it’s being done to them. Not every show is going to be 30 Rock and laugh at the concept even as it uses it:

But even if people end up buying a Snapple because Liz Lemon likes it, or shampoo because it makes Robin’s hair look fantastic on How I Met Your Mother (I just started watching, and her hair), or test-driving a car because the main character on Castle does it, this is hardly the worst thing to happen. And for the most part, I suspect people know why they’re doing what they’re doing. It may be foolish to think that I can ever look like Jennifer Morrison without a set full of dresses, extensive plastic surgery, and a magical application of extra tallness. But if I spend a few dollars occasionally because I dig her eye shadow, no harm, no foul, in the indulgence of the fantasy and its immediate debunking.

We talk a lot about overly cozy relationships between business and government, and about the creep of cost-saving measures like products into art, lending it a corporate cast. But it’s rare to see something as blatant as TLC’s planned show about Southwest Airlines. I’ll reserve final judgment until I see the show, of course. But it does seem to me that if you want to make a show about the experience of air travel as a whole, you need to include a lot of people who aren’t employed by specific airlines, particularly air traffic controllers, Transportation Security Administration officers, and ground crew, who are not always affiliated with specific airlines. And it seems like good documentary principal, even if you wanted to make a show about what it’s like to run an airline, to include representatives of multiple companies so viewers can see what the common challenges are and what problems are specific to individual companies and their policies. I understand the desire to make cheap entertainment: these aren’t easy times. But extended looks at individual businesses risk coming across as boring commercials, a la DC Cupcakes, a veteran of the same network.

Who knew when I wrote about The Joneses a couple of weeks ago that an adaptation of the movie’s concept for television was coming to ABC. I think this is entirely fascinating, and I have absolutely no idea how it’s going to work.

The Joneses, which is about a fake family who moves into an affluent neighborhood to stimulate their neighbors into a round of aspirational spending, does have wonderful opportunities for product placement. Almost every scene involves a discussion of a particular item that the characters are being told about by their handlers or promoting to their neighbors as the next cool thing. But the overall message of the show is that our cycles of consumption are artificially induced rather than a reflection of our actual desires or any utility those products might add to our lives—and that ramping up that cycle can be destructive to the point of death.

It will be interesting to see if advertisers think that the overall aspirational message will be powerful enough that it’s worth it to have their products associated with the show, even if the vaguer message is that consumption is bad and we should be skeptical of racing to keep up with the Joneses. That was clearly what happened with the movie, which was chock-full of luxury goods. Either that, or the anti-consumptive message will be moderated to some more general assertions about authenticity and happiness, all of which we know are just as purchasable as Birkin bags.