I really enjoyed “Jessica Jones” season 1. Season 2 came out on Thursday and I continue to enjoy it. Beyond the characters and the plots, though, I am fascinated by Jessica’s bourbon and whiskey choices.
If you don’t know the show, Jessica is a private eye with a lot of past trauma and she drinks . . . a lot. Like, to crazy excess, usually to forget stuff or deal with stress. She often has hangovers but rarely seems drunk, even after drinking an entire bottle in an evening. They don’t mention it, but I suspect that since she has super powers she has super tolerance too. Either way, getting the headache but not the buzz seems like a pretty shitty deal for her.
Her brands are what interest me most. Jessica is a brown liquor woman, but she was all over the map with her whiskey choices and I can’t watch an episode without noticing what she’s drinking and wondering why she, or, rather, the producers, chose it.
In season one she had a different brand every episode. Sometimes multiple brands an episode. Sometimes it was scotch, sometimes bourbon, sometimes Canadian. She occasionally drank some fictitious brands from the prop department. The real products came from multiple distillers. In light of all of that I don’t suspect that any of those bottles were there by virtue of product placement.
If it was product placement it was pretty crappy product placement for the distilleries involved. For example, in one episode she asks a convenience store clerk for “the cheapest you got.” He sells her Wild Turkey 101, which is not the cheapest he or anyone else has. I doubt Wild Turkey would like to have 101 portrayed as rotgut if it was paying to have its bottle featured. In the next episode she’s drinking Old Grandad and earlier drank Beam, Teacher’s and freakin’ Cutty, so she obviously does know where to get cheaper stuff. She’s a detective!
For the first two episodes of season two, she drinks only Tin Cup. Because the exclusivity and because the bottle and its label are shown so prominently, I suspected that Tin Cup had paid for exclusive rights for the much more anticipated Season 2. But . . . nah. In episode three she’s back to Four Roses yellow label. Again, though, if Tin Cup did pay for that placement, they may not care for how it was used. Jessica drinks it like water — at one point she literally fills a 10 ounce water class with the stuff, straight up and chugs — and at another point she has a nightmare where she’s hooked up to a Tin Cup IV, the bourbon flowing straight into her veins. There’s no such thing as bad publicity I guess, but I feel like a distiller wouldn’t want to have its brand being used explicitly to show how much of a problem drinker a character is. “Drink Tin Cup: the preferred brand for functioning alcoholics everywhere!”
If it isn’t product placement, I don’t understand all of the switching. Sure, a whiskey enthusiast may get a different bottle every time, but Jessica isn’t someone you’d call a whiskey enthusiast. She’s a drunk. Or at least a wannabe drunk. I’ve known some drunks in my time. If they’re like Jessica and they are (a) functional; and (b) at least make a passable living, so that they don’t have to take whatever they can get, they tend to have brand loyalty. Or at least price point loyalty. Even if they do change up brands, they don’t bounce from bourbon to scotch to rye the way she does.
Last season some sites like Buzzfeed kept track of what she was drinking. I am only three episodes into season 2 — it’s a treadmill show for me, so it’s a one a day thing, not something I, uh, binge — but I’m gonna continue to keep track myself. I’m more fascinated in this than I am in the shady forces Jessica Jones is fighting. She’ll beat them in the end. I have no idea what’s gonna happen with the next bottle.
