Everybody seemed to enjoy the last time I wrote about my history on the job, so consider this now a recurring What Else Is Alan Watching? bonus feature. Today, I'll be exploring one of the more amusing aspects of my job: the swag.
Alan Sepinwall
First, for those who don't know, the term "swag" originated as an acronym, for "stolen without a gun." (I learned this fact from none other than Joey Pants himself, while we were walking around Hoboken while he was promoting his memoir.) Language is an evolving thing, and at least in the world in which I move, swag now refers to anything given freely to people at events, and/or through the mail, usually as some kind of promotional effort.
When I went to my first TCA press tour in the summer of 1996, I couldn't believe all the freebies that were being handed out. At a press conference for CNBC, every seat in the ballroom had a box with a free cell phone on it — back when they were still relatively rare, and expensive. I was so young and new at the job that it didn't even occur to me that taking such a thing might be a violation of professional ethics, until a more veteran critic politely but firmly suggested I leave the box behind.
Most of the swag, though, was more harmless: hats and t-shirts and towels and blankets with TV show logos on them. I have an entire chest in one room of our house filled with nothing but swag fleece blankets. I haven't bought a new baseball cap in at least 20 years, though I for the most part try to only wear the branded ones for shows I already like. My family has an uncanny tendency to break drinking glasses, but fortunately, networks and streamers keep sending us cocktail kits with branded tumblers in them(*).
(*) These were especially prevalent during early COVID, when the amount of mailed swag seemed to skyrocket. The thing is, budgets in big corporations are use-it-or-lose-it. And with press tour canceled due to lockdown, the network PR departments had to spend that money on something, or else that line item would be removed the next year.
I've purged a whole lot of this stuff over the years, but I still have some of the odder and/or cooler ones, and some critic pals have hung onto ones I either gave away or left behind. So here is just a very, very small sampling. Some of these were products that were also made available for public purchase, while others were manufactured solely for marketing purposes.