What is this I don't even: Part 4

As my wife has pointed out many times to me over the last three years, I am becoming a bitter old man. In truth, I long for the day when I can shuffle around my retirement home, complaining about every damn thing, remembering the good ol' days, and being as surly as can be. In the meantime, I'll reserve my complaints to things that are genuinely terrible. And friends, we are in the midst of two completely terrible ad campaigns.

First, we have the Frobinson Framily. Sprint Corporation, in their continued efforts to stay relevant in the cellular market, is promoting their "framily plan", which allows anyone to start new plans or combine their existing ones into a single extended plan. It operates much like a typical family plan, only the participants can live at different addresses and receive and pay bills separately. That, in and of itself, is a solid idea. It provides savings for the customer while also encouraging groups of friends to switch to Sprint. What is absolutely not a solid idea is the way it's presented through their TV ads:



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I'm really struggling to understand what the intent of the ad is. It's not funny. It's not referential. It's not clever. It's just flat-out puzzling. Why is the patriarch a hamster? Why does that girl have animated birds constantly flying around her? And if the entire point of the plan is that they're billed separately, why are they all living together? It gets worse when we meet Gor-Don:



So mom and emo-basement-dweller are talking about goth-basement-dweller and he's creepily standing over their shoulders listening to them. Yes, this clearly makes me want to sign up for a new cell phone plan. Judy Greer deserves better. They even forked over the money for Kevin Durant to appear in another bit, for reasons undetermined. Maybe I'm just missing the point. Maybe there is something hidden beneath the surface that ties the whole ad campaign together. But for the life of me, I can't find it.

But oh, the state of commercials gets better, and by better I mean much worse. DirecTV is almost always ahead of the curve in their ongoing war with the cable and FIOS industries and other satellite providers. They've paid the NFL truckloads of money to retain the exclusive rights to Sunday Ticket. They were one of the first to realize the appeal of TiVo and digital video recorders, and offer them with their service subscription. Now their latest hook is servicing multiple televisions without the need for boxes or cables in every room. Sounds great, huh? Let's introduce America to the wireless TV with a little nightmare fuel:



Ad exec: "Cable boxes have wires and marionettes have wires so let's go with that! People love some good old-fashioned marionette humor!"

Board room: *stunned silence*

Ad exec: "Well do you fuckers have any better ideas?"

Board room: *tumbleweed rolls by*

Considering this guy is having his friend over to watch TV, wouldn't the friend know that the wife is a fucking puppet? And that's not just me cursing, they have a son and she also has a father, so that's three generations of marionettes that are sentient and able to reproduce. Terrifying, and I never even saw the Child's Play movies. But how are things in the bedroom, you might ask (if you were a sociopath)? Well, doll-fuckers, DirecTV has an answer for you:



Didn't anyone in the design and production of these commercials stand up and say, "You know what? Maybe we shouldn't depict a grown man in a sexual relationship with a life-size wooden doll." Seriously, these ads just make my skin crawl.

What is this I don't even