If you live in Manhattan, and your Time Warner Cable DVR has been acting up lately, the culprit may be a spirit.
Not the spectral kind. We're talking about Dewar's, the "sophisticated whisky that's honeyed and spicy, yet light and smoky," as Bacardi, the Bermuda-based liquor behemoth that owns the Dewar's brand, puts it.
According to several avid TV viewers, no fewer than four of whom work at Radar, the new ads for Dewar's, which feature inane quotes—"Dewarisms"—from a fake dead guy named Tommy Dewar set to indie-rock tunes, have been rendered unskippable on Time Warner DVRs. When our correspondents have attempted to fast-forward through the spots while watching previously recorded episodes of Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Colbert Report, their DVRs mysteriously freeze up, forcing them to sit through them. Only the Dewar's spots seem to make the DVRs uncooperative—they speed through all the other commercials just as they were designed to.
Of course, unskippable ads would be the Holy Grail to DVR-weary advertisers and television networks, which made us curious. And we're not alone: "[O]ur DVR stops and refuses to fast forward through the Dewar's commercials," wrote Lianne Habinek, a New York blogger, in September. "Suspicious? I believe so. Every other commercial it zips through just fine. But Dewar's? Not so much. We had to watch half a dozen Dewarisms. HALF A DOZEN, people. How many more will it take before we realize what's going on here?"