Around 2010 or so, [=DirecTV=] launched an advertising campaign regarding their service.

Inspired by the book [[Literature/IfYouGiveAMouseACookie If You Give a Mouse a Cookie]], the commercials consist of people being disappointed in their cable services, followed by a series of unfortunate events happening, and long story short, the narrator admonishes viewers to switch to [=DirecTV=].

The format is like this: "When something adverse related to cable happens, you do A. When you do A, it causes B." And so on until "...it causes G. Don't let G happen. Get rid of cable and upgrade to [=DirecTV=]."

Several of these commercials can be viewed [[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgw_iKxJQfOhsXYbqKWNCcZ8b-jjJlrvE here]].
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%% Be very careful commenting out Zero-Context Examples. Most of these examples aren't given enough context by the commercials themselves, or said context is covered as an example of another trope.
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!!This campaign features examples of:

* ArsonMurderAndJaywalking: Sometimes the final item is less bad than the item preceding it. For example:
-->''When you go to Vegas, you lose everything. And when you lose everything, you sell your hair to a wig shop. Don't sell your hair to a wig shop.''
* AttendingYourOwnFuneral: One customer fakes his death and attends his own funeral as a guy named Phil Schiffly.
-->"Don't attend your own funeral as a guy named Phil Schiffly."
* BeardOfSorrow: The guy collecting stray animals grows a long beard.
* BigBlackout: A man's desire to feel free leads to him going hang gliding, crashing into a power line, causing the grid to go down, causing mass rioting, and looting, leading to the man's father getting punched over a can of soup.
* CableSatelliteMudslinging: The commercial depicts cable as so inconvenient that it indirectly ruins the customer's life.
* TheCameo: Creator/CharlieSheen makes an appearance in one of the ads, wanting to reenact scenes from ''Film/{{Platoon}}''.
* CrazyCatLady: Because his wife left him over his supposed anger issues, a lonely man starts adopting strays.
* DisasterDominoes: In each commercial, the inconveniences of cable lead to a series of increasingly worse circumstances that result in the customer's life being ruined.
* DyeOrDie: When you fake your death, you dye your eyebrows.
* EpicFail: When you run along rooftops, you fall into a dinner party.
* EscapedAnimalRampage: A gorilla named Jimbo escapes from his cage and attacks (body slams) the protagonist at his home after the guy they gave his job to made a mistake and left Jimbo's cage unlocked when he was tending to another animal.
* EyepatchOfPower: Parodied. "When you get an eyepatch, people think you're tough."
* FakingTheDead: One guy saw [[PunkInTheTrunk a thing "you shouldn't see"]] which caused him to fake his own death and attend his own funeral as a guy named Phil Schiffly.
* InsaneTrollLogic: All over the place. From a man deciding to become a vigilante after a few Karate lessons, to a man forced to become a village fisherman because of a bad reaction to being stung by "something exotic."
* MiscarriageOfJustice: If you have cable and your picture freezes, your work suffers, the wrong man goes to jail, he has time to think, he thinks about you, a lot, and your house explodes.
* MushroomSamba: A man who was stranded in the wild after a car accident caused by his sleep-deprivation due to getting tense from his cable being on the fritz and has to survive, eats wild berries and hallucinates a swarm of butterflies, that he chases into "something highly illegal."
* OverlyLongGag: The number of steps a commercial takes to reach its endgame vary, and can number up to quite a few.
* PercussiveTherapy: One commercial had a father smack the armrest of his chair in frustration over his cable problems. This left an impression on his young daughter, who grew up to be a rebellious hellion who marries a bad boy. The commercial concludes that if this series of events happen when your cable's on the fritz, "you will get a grandson with a dog collar".
* PrisonsAreGymnasiums: The wrongly convicted man is shown working out in prison.
* RageAgainstTheLegalSystem: The wrongly convicted man blows up the lawyer's house.
* RearWindowWitness: When you start staring out windows, you see [[PunkInTheTrunk things you shouldn't see]].
* RoofHopping: When you become ''[[TheXofY The Fist of Goodness]]'', you run along rooftops, which results in you crashing through a sky roof and into a dinner party.
* RuleOfFunny: None of these horrible outcomes are very likely, but they're funny.
* SlipperySlopeFallacy: The crux of the ads is how having cable will lead to all sorts of ridiculous misfortune.
* SlowElectricity: When the glider crashes into the pylon, the resulting power outage hits the city district by district.
* SpaceWhaleAesop: The point of the commercials is, "If you don't get rid of cable, something bizarrely unfortunate will happen to you."
* StuffBlowingUp: The wrongly convicted man decides to blow up the lawyer's house.
* VivaLasVegas: "When you feel like a winner, you go to Vegas." You then go on to lose everything you had and have to sell your hair to a wig shop to get money.
* YouCantGoHomeAgain: A man is bitten by "something exotic" while he is on vacation and quarantined. He is eventually forced to live as a fisherman the locals call "Big Fatty-Face".

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