It’s common knowledge that the necessary evil of the television world is commercials. Sure, their existence pays for our precious TV programs, but then we use all our scientific knowledge on devices that allow us to avoid the advertising experience, such as TiVo, the VCR, the mute button, the bathroom, etc.

Even the people who make commercials know that they are doing dirty, soulless work. As a result, nobody really expects commercials to have effort, heart, or coherence. I realize this. But I expect commercials to make a *tad* bit more sense than the KFC ads I’ve seen recently.

The commercial, for those of you who haven’t seen it, features a friendly-looking woman pulling up to a KFC, parking next to a Tyson truck, talking about how the chicken is fresh or something. She then says “How do I know? I’m the cook here”, as she dons an apron and hat. Okay, a bit pretentious, I suppose, but fine…except at the bottom of the screen, it clearly says “ACTOR PORTRAYAL”.

And suddenly, with those two little words, NOTHING in the commercial makes any sense anymore.

WHY did they need to hire an actress to read some facts and say she’s a cook? Were there no actual cooks at any KFCs who looked friendly enough? (Actually, I suppose that is a possibility.)

Okay. Fine. So, they figure we’d rather look at a friendly-but-nondescript actress than an actual cook. So why bother having her claim to be a cook? Do they really think we’ll trust her more on this issue if she claims to be a cook? Because that trust is kinda undermined by those words at the bottom of the screen. If she’s willing to lie about being a cook, how do we know she’s telling the truth about the damn chicken? Frankly, I’d be more inclined to believe her claims about the chicken’s freshness if she just admitted “How do I know? Because I’m reading it off a damn cue card!” At least then we can believe she’s honest.

Go to hell, KFC, for causing me untold sleepless nights of anguish with your stupid, nonsensical commercial. To hell, I say!