The second guess I put to Kent was a number hazarded by Phil Cassese, a commercial agent at Stewart Talent. Cassese’s clients have appeared in ads for brands like Olive Garden and Verizon. (One, a young redhead, served as the new face of Wendy’s after its 2012 rebrand.) By his estimation, the star of a “splashy campaign,” along the lines of “Superstore,” might reasonably expect to hit the $1 million mark after four or five years — around the time of the Cronut and “Blurred Lines,” in Courtney’s case. Fifteen years in, Cassese said, an annual figure “like $10 million” would be “in the fair ballpark.”
You know how sometimes, in a commercial, there is a scene that takes place in a house? How many houses do you suppose the commercial auteurs need to borrow to pull that off? “Zero — that’s what movie magic is for”? Perhaps, “One”? In fact, on a gray morning this past spring, the people who make the Progressive commercials commandeered a whole block of houses, to shoot scenes inside one family’s appealingly nondescript home. “There are specific neighborhoods in L.A. that don’t look like L.A.,” Sean McBride told me. “If you start paying attention,” he said, you will notice the same homes reused “constantly.”
To the tree-lined block, the “Superstore” team had trucked a quantity of equipment sufficient to stage a three-hour Beyoncé concert on the moon. There were lights, cameras, actors’ gleaming trailers and portable heaters — it was, after all, 62 degrees outside — but most of the equipment just looked like … equipment? Like: sturdy black tubs with lids, crates, clamps, poles, spaghetti heaps of power cords, racks of racks, extra-large folded-up things, rectangles and tubular items. Some of this arsenal had been used to transform the living room of one house into a Black person’s living room. Perhaps it already was one — but because regular people don’t naturally style their dwellings in commercially approved ways (literally, a representative from Progressive HQ must walk through the set and approve every single item that will appear on camera), because they have things like artwork (stupid), their own furniture (ugly), family photos (who is that?!) and Rubik’s cubes (forbidden, because Rubik’s Cubes® are trademarked), all the aforementioned must be temporarily disappeared and replaced with narratively appropriate, legally generic this and that. If cars are present, their manufacturer logos are covered with abstract shapes of similar dimensions, their license plates, upon inspection, cursively reading not “California” but “Drive Safely.” This obfuscation process is called “Greeking,” as in, “It’s all Greek to me” (as in, “I can’t tell what that says, but it definitely doesn’t say Kia Optima, for legal reasons”).
If my visit to the “Superstore” set can be taken as representative, being closely involved with the production of popular TV commercials for large national brands is the best possible outcome for a human life. The scale and complexity of the operation at the center of Courtney’s work is eye-popping. Every fleeting football-game-interrupting Progressive ad is the product of hours of labor from more than a hundred people. On set, a cat wrangler stood just out of frame, ready to pounce with a backup cat if the primary cat failed. Trays of lickerish delights — crostini with prosciutto, cups of ethereal parfait — were discreetly proffered, at frequent intervals, to people scrutinizing monitors. Every lens, light and politely anxious face was turned heliotropically toward Courtney, in a rented living room, trying to remember, while delivering her line, that Progressive was offering deals “for new parents” rather than “to new parents” — a possibly meaningful distinction. This wasn’t a critically acclaimed Hulu series; there was actually a lot riding on this. It needed to be the same, but slightly different, and every bit as successful as the 200 that had come before it, so that everyone would be asked to return to this job — not necessarily, perhaps not exactly, the job of their dreams, but a better job than anyone could ever hope for, bolstered by friendly faces and fantastic catering and a sumptuous corporate budget — in perpetuity.
Many entertainers progress from commercial work (young Leonardo DiCaprio for Bubble Yum) to critical acclaim; some later double back to endorsement work to cash in on their renown (less-young Leonardo DiCaprio for the Guangdong OPPO Mobile Telecommunications Corporation). Few, in either stage, find their likenesses permanently welded to a multibillion-dollar company. Courtney continued auditioning for other ads even after landing Progressive, but suspected that even casting directors who liked Stephanie Courtney refused to hire Flo. She could have avoided what has become an indelible association by abandoning the role early on. But she almost certainly could not have been as successful as an actor had she not played Flo for 15 years; few actors are.