There is a portal to the dream world, flickering open and closed in the commercial breaks between episodes of The Real Housewives in the Peacock app, and always in proximity to the promise of domestic bliss.
In their recent marketing, insurance companies Progressive and State Farm, as well as non-insurance companies such as Wayfair and Verizon, have chosen a popular filming location in a corridor of a Universal Studios back lot that resembles a suburban neighborhood—originally laid out for the 1989 Tom Hanks movie The ’Burbs. It has since appeared in decades of programming, from horror movies to Super Bowl spots, but hundreds of millions of people would recognize even a sliver of it, with the decisive and instantaneous understanding a child feels beholding their mother for the first time, as Wisteria Lane, the setting for ABC’s Desperate Housewives.
