• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, July 12, 2024

Three brand names came up for mentioning in the first five minutes of the new, bizarre animated series “Exploding Kittens,” which starts streaming Friday on Netflix.

Were these paid product placements, or just coincidental details that the writers of the premiere episode -- which the TV Blog previewed on Thursday -- felt necessary to include?

In all, the TV Blog counted five brand names in the 25-minute episode. The one that fared best was the first one, DiGiorno frozen pizza.

The premise of the series is that God the Lord Almighty is a careless party animal who got so inebriated one evening that he forgot he had a DiGiorno’s pizza in the oven.

A fire resulted that burned an entire heavenly neighborhood. It was God’s fault, not the pizza’s. Thus, the message was: “DiGiorno’s, pizza of God.”

To get back to the show’s premise, God gets called before a heavenly Board of Directors convened to address this incident and to discuss God’s behavior in general.

They decide that God must be sent to Earth to answer the prayers of some common folk because he has completely forsaken the planet he created.

For reasons that I either did not learn or did not understand, they sent him to Earth in the guise of a sardonic talking cat -- kind of the feline version of Seth MacFarlane’s talking dog, Brian, in “Family Guy.”

The destination chosen for this irritable God Cat was a family somewhere in the U.S. named Higgins (above photo).

They are an animated exaggeration of a modern dysfunctional family. The young teenage son is an obese YouTube addict. His teen sister is an obnoxious, know-it-all nerd.

Dad is an overweight devotee of board games, some of which he invents himself. Mom is a local animal control officer who drinks too much.

Various hijinks ensue that are much too complicated to relate here. I lost the thread of the whole thing, anyhow.

But since MediaPost’s focus is on advertising, the product placements -- or just “product-mentions” -- are what drew my attention.

Soon after DiGiorno’s was positioned as the pizza preferred by God, the body spray brand Axe came in for good-natured fun when one of the characters complained about a new Axe pumpkin fragrance timed for Halloween.

The board game Scattergories was the next product to make it into the “Exploding Kittens” script in the first five minutes, although in this instance, Mrs. Higgins hated the game.

Later in the show, QVC was mentioned when the same Mrs. Higgins excused herself from another excruciating family game night by running off to watch the home-shopping channel.

The last brand to make it into the show was the Subway sandwich brand. The joke here was that Subway stories emit a noxious odor. If Subway paid for this, I wonder what they’ll think of it?

“Exploding Kittens” has been adapted somehow from a card game called “Exploding Kittens.” But as far as I can remember, no kittens exploded in the episode of the TV show that I saw. 

“Exploding Kittens” premieres Friday, July 12, on Netflix.