2023 Author: Cody Thornton | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-06-06 02:02
The life of soap opera writers lasts. Take those of Beautiful. Which, I confess immediately, I have been following (episode more, episode less) since its inception.
There, they have a handful of characters on their hands, more or less the same for 29 years, and with them they have to do a little bit of everything.
To build loves, betrayals and intrigues, of course, but also to wink at ordinary people, throwing here and there big current issues (to say, lately they are about transsexuality and surrogacy) but also more reassuring skits of everyday life in which the spectator or, more rarely, the viewer can identify themselves.
Among the latter there is, of course, the kitchen. Until a few seasons ago, represented by exclusive restaurants like the mythological Cafe Russe where Ridge and Brooke and Thorne and Taylor and Stephanie and Eric dined sipping champagne at least once a week.
Then, perhaps thanks to the crisis (which even closed the elegant restaurant, complete with a farewell episode), the food topic became more homemade and entrusted to Pam, the beaten-up sister of the late Stephanie with a craze for lemon cakes.
Today, there is no episode dedicated to any occasion, public or private (from Thanksgiving to Christmas, from yet another wedding to one of the rare funerals), in which the blonde receptionist of Forrester Creations, wearing an apron stolen from Martha Stewart, you do not flourish in the large kitchen of the family villa, cooking lucullian lunches, baking mammoth turkeys, mixing sauces and doughs.
Often, in the company of Charlie, a security guard and his unlikely boyfriend, just as beaten up.
And in short, what are these two up to me the other day? He arrives with the shopping to set up the family table and starts extracting this and that from the paper bag until his face blanched and exclaims contritely something like: Dear me, I was wrong, I bought the Grain, I immediately run to the store to get the Parmesan “.
While she, who also has a dark past as a would-be murderer, gives him back a scary look.
Here, at this point I jumped on the sofa, spilling the coffee. And the same must have done the gentlemen of Grana Padano Protection Consortium. Which, in fact, immediately (and rightly, I add) gave a mandate to their lawyers to ask the production compensation for image damage.
Because if The Bold & the Beautiful (this is the original title of the soap, which we could translate as "beautiful and cheeky") prefer one cheese to the other, well, for the Milwaukee housewife it could be a valid reason to do the same.
Not to mention that the program airs in a hundred different countries reaching something like 300 million viewers, and related housewives.
In short, the " Grenades "Could become a grain (and you'll excuse the pun) of more than considerable size.
This is especially surprising because the aforementioned screenwriters and the whole production have always shown themselves careful not to mention any brand.
They always refer to generic social networks, computers have the intuitive apple covered by an anonymous fake logo, the bottles of water are covered with an equally anonymous label (although curiously it carries the words "Acqua Minerale" in Italian) and so Street.
And in short, precisely these two brands (which are such) should they have mentioned? And so inappropriately?
Waiting for the developments to come, this slip made me a little angry. For a matter of national pride, of course, and because the actors' joke reveals an all-American carelessness towards our cuisine and its typical products.
If on the one hand overseas they fill their mouths (more or less literally) with spaghetti and pizza, buffalo mozzarella and raw ham, on the other hand they cyclically subject our gastronomic culture to unfair contempt.
I hope that the lawyers of the consortium strike up a case with all the trimmings. May they win it. And that maybe what happened could serve as a starting point for an episode of one of my favorite legal series.
I know, The Good Wife maybe.