Supplemental Post #4 - Andrea

I've been haunted at the thought of Cherries Wild, a Pepsi TV game show on Fox (yes, Pepsi has a TV game show now), ever since I watched youtube comedian Drew Gooden's critique of the show (link to Drew's video). I long for the days when I didn't know this existed, but I haven't known what to make of the show in regards to our class. I've come to realize that the Henry Jenkins text this week, "The Cultural Logic of Media Convergence," helped me think through just some of the reasons the existence of this show is simultaneously baffling and unsurprising. 

The show itself is a glorified 30-minute ad for Pepsi, a company notoriously trying to keep up and failing the marketing game in recent years (hello Kendall Jenner), and Drew reveals that the game show premise itself is rigged and false by the end of his commentary video. The show's small text reveals that the slot machine game itself is a prerecorded/cgi video and the results are rigged, making the marketing scheme that much more transparent. As Drew discusses in his video, the audience members are mostly recorded and/or seem to be filmed in a COVID environment, and the fake audience only adds to the unnaturalness of the show. Additionally, there is an added "audience participation" aspect to the show, in which audience members are encouraged to play along and basically gamble via the Cherries Wild app (which apparently almost never works and never awards people their prizes for playing along). 

Cherries Wild seems to fail at key aspects of media convergence as outlined in Jenkin's article, namely the idea that "convergence is both a top-down corporate-driven process and bottom-up consumer-driven process" (37). The show makes the corporate-driven processes transparent in an embarrassing fashion while failing to provide adequate consumer-driven engagement. Cherries Wild is an embarrassing attempt at meeting the standards of contemporary media convergence; it's a pathetic "hey kids" thrown at younger consumers engaged 24/7 in an Internet/smartphone-driven world, and a boring ad masquerading as a game show for older audiences attuned to the traditions and tenets of average game shows.