Mario Lopez's Lifetime-KFC mini-movie A Recipe for Seduction was "as refreshingly blunt as you can get"

The Atlantic

A Recipe for Seduction, which aired Sunday and is now available in its entirety on YouTube, "may be long, as traditional ads go, and it may manifest more as branded content than direct marketing message—but it is, transparently, an ad, created by agents of Yum! Brands to generate desire for its subsidiary’s meal deals," says Megan Garber. "Recipe is a joint production of Lifetime, which is selling escapism, and KFC, which is selling chicken. It aired yesterday, nestled between the holiday rom-coms The Christmas Listing (rival real-estate agents find love over the holidays) and Feliz NaviDAD (a single father, played by Mario Lopez, finds love over the holidays). I watched it. And I would like to pay it the highest compliment I know how to give to an ad: It is exactly what it claims to be—nothing less, nothing more, nothing else." Garber adds: "The jokes are in one way works of their postmodern moment. But they also have a throwback feel. The genre this ad-movie is spoofing, the soap opera, got its name from the work Procter & Gamble did to produce the daytime stories that were marketed to housewives."