This Zocdoc Commercial is the Most Real

There are some commercials I wish I would never see again (looking at you Campbell’s!) and then there are ads that really hit the mark. They’re either funny, relatable, bizarre in a good way, or all of the above. A recent ad from Zocdoc is, dare I say, adorable. In fact, it specifically displays everything I hope for with young actors (elementary young’n’s). Can you guess what it is? First, here’s the commercial…

My biggest pet peeve in film and TV is when adolescent characters are given lines in a script that sound nothing like an actual real-world child. Dialogue is obviously written by adults. But Zocdoc is different in this ad. I’m sure it was written by adults but I also have an inclination to believe those adults have kids or at the very least consulted kids in the making of this commercial. It could also be possible that the director gave the kids freedom to respond and speak freely to see what would transpire. It worked. With kids that age, everything is life and death. And random. Those elements are front and center with the boy sneezing, the girl having a flashlight in her mom’s face. It’s so funny, so genuine, so relatable. And in this YouTube version of the commercial, there’s something not shown on streaming or TV. Did you catch it? Watch the mother as she musters the energy to leave the chair at the end of the spot. She trips over books on the floor and I laughed out loud. Like when everything is going wrong, of course, something else will top the iceberg of annoyance.

Like Chris Farley having a bad day in Tommy Boy. Everything was falling apart. He was barely hanging on to his sanity and then he sat down on a sidewalk bench. The bench breaks and he says something like, “Could’ve done without that.” It’s that one thing that makes the fragile house of cards crumble. The mom in the ad could’ve done without everything the kids did and the trip at the end, it very well have not been on purpose, which makes it even better.

-Out of the Wilderness