For whatever reason, Nextel and GEICO ads seem to dominate the television programming I watch - chiefly hockey, Match Game and the Food Network. As a result I see their new spots with great regularity, and since I pay attention to these things, I notice how they change.

I loved the GEICO ads of years past - the ones with the cartoon character with the big nose and the live actors doing silly stupid things and suffering consequences that showed why insurance was a good idea. Then they started the gecko ads, which were increasingly awful. Finally, thankfully, they've pretty much quit those.

The new campaign uses a shift-of-context sort of gag, and in their best performances it's almost Shakespearean. The joke is always someone inappropriately touting the "good news" that he/she has saved money on his/her car insurance. (Now that I think of it, I think it's always a guy.) The first to appear was the inmate being led into a room with his attorney, talking excitedly on a cell phone (about which more below) and giving the inmate a thumbs-up sign. He gets off the phone, turns to the inmate and says "I have good news." "I'm outta here?" "No, I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to GEICO." And then the coup de grace: the attorney gives the inmate a playful sock on the shoulder, and the inmate gives him a chilling look.

It's marvelous, but I've grown tired of it, especially in light of the others. The rotten white rapper ad tricked me the first time or two, because it looks like a beer ad for some reason. The "hair replacement" ad is excellent in conception and performance, but they got greedy with the awful hairdos of the mock-interview "clients." The first time I saw it I recognized it was a sham, because the hair on the fellow playing tennis is just too preciously bad.

But the one that really nails me, and still sometimes almost tricks me, is the one played out like a soap opera. The actors are absolutely brilliant in that, really living out the soap-operatic characters through the whole thing. It also boasts what I think is the single greatest line any commercial actor ever had the honor to perform: "I saved. I thought that meant something to you." As if that weren't enough, there's a bit of business with the camera that is so subtle I bet even most people who enjoy the ad haven't noticed: as he's reading that show-stopper of a line, the camera pans until he's almost out of shot, a mimicry of exactly the kind of not-ready-for-prime-time camera work one might see on a soap. Lately there has been no ad anywhere close to that level of perfection.

I had an acting teacher way back when named Jill Bloede who used to speak of a point of "total admit" in a scene. This to her was a kind of Mametesque realist behavior where the face of the actor would slacken and signify a moment of abandonment, an admission of one's bad faith. It's kind of like a deer caught in the headlights. In the kind of arch satire the GEICO campaign attempts, the goal should be "never admit": maintain the lie, cling desperately to bad faith. The bad haired tennis player was taken too far and the lie became transparent, but "I saved. I thought that meant something to you" simply never relents.

On the other side of the spectrum, there's Nextel. I've previously assaulted Nextel's crapola ads with Dennis Franz playing with his communicator toy, but those might actually have been better than their current campaign.

Somebody criticized some form of new technology as "a solution in search of a problem," and that always comest to mind when I see a commercial for the Nextel walkie-talkie cell phone. The Franz ads showed him having inane, pointless, uselss conversations that made his life more inconvenient, as a way of selling the phone as a convenient tool. The new ads show the phone being used in ways that speed up processes and interactions that have no reason to be sped up, and that make life more stressful and complicated.

First there's the business meeting ad, with a bunch of execs sitting around a conference table. They whip out their phones and start "tweet"ing at each other to discuss moving operations somewhere. Most of the conversation is in one-word statements, because, you see, the idea is that cell phones make busy people able to do more faster. San Diego is nice, but too expensive. "Solution? Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh?? Great paper. Best paper. Pittsburgh paper." Etc.

(I'm assuming this means newspaper, since the quality of sheets of bleached wood pulp for writing and printing is no different in the Burgh than anywhere else. Why it makes sense to move operations to a place with a good newspaper aside, the qualifications of Pittsburgh's two dailies to be the "best" should be in grave doubt. I loved the Post-Gazette while we lived there, but I recognize that it's barely better than the San Francisco Chronicle.)

I get the symbolism, but what the ad shows me is the phones making the meeting less efficient, because everybody is already in the room as it is, and yet they persist in using these damn phones that "tweet" every time somebody wants to talk. But not only are their phones capable of making human interaction less human and intelligible, they also can intervene in activities that nobody wants to make quicker - like weddings.

I honestly don't know what to say about the wedding ad. "Do you?" "Uh-huh." What can I add to that?

Actually, "solution in search of a problem" doesn't accurately reflect the Nextel ads. Here it's more like a complication in search of something to make problematic. And I still think the cell phone industry is just a front for people hoping to make billions in the ear-cancer industry.