In the 1930s, Proctor and Gamble, perhaps unwittingly, changed serialized storytelling forever by sponsoring dramas that aired midday on the radio. Because most of these dramas’s Depression-era listeners would have been women using the radio as background noise while performing domestic duties, the serials played out homespun fantasies: What if a handsome stranger arrived in a cloak of sexy danger and offered an escape from the tedium of the everyday?
But while soap operas in the traditional, midday serial format are not as popular as they once were, the desire for stories about greed, murder, and boning never go out of style. Oddly enough, the brand that best understands the lesson of the soap—that people living through a time that is both difficult and boring need some ridiculous shit to distract them—seems to be Kentucky Fried Chicken. Perhaps due to the success of its 2017 Mother’s Day romance novel Wings of Desire, the brand has partnered with Lifetime for a “mini-movie” about a hot young woman’s quest to fuck Mario Lopez playing Colonel Sanders.
It’s dumb! It’s sexy! There’s fried chicken! Finally, someone has heard our cry and believed an amalgamation of our collective desires.
A trailer for A Recipe for Seduction promises that there will be complications, perhaps murderous complications, to a plot involving mansions, preppy shoulder-draped sweaters, secret chicken recipes, sharp knives, and the desire for illicit sex with a trendily grey-haired and well-muscled Colonel who came to fry chicken and rip bodices in no particular order. Most of us have probably already binged dumber shit this pandemic, so why not? Bring on some corporate-sponsored smutty chicken spon-con.
A Recipe for Seduction premieres at noon Sunday on Lifetime.