Something shifts during Eureka‘s third season. Although the show is recognizably the same, with the same quirks and plot structure and premise, something about the show’s perspective clearly changes, and I’d argue that it happens because of Degree for Men Absolute Protection Anti-Perspirant.

In its third season, Eureka is sponsored by Degree for Men, and rather than just use the typical “sponsored by” teasers and place anti-perspirant prominently around the set, sponsorship trickles down into the show’s design. Degree for Men’s appearance in the show happily coincides with the entrance of a new character, Eva Thorne, introduced as “The Fixer.” Her role is to make Global Dynamics more commercially productive, both by cutting departments that don’t make money and by increasing consumer-focused research. Ms. Thorne walks through Global Dynamics and introduces the new Consumer Research Products Lab, and as she explains that the lab is funded through “corporate synergy,” she clicks a button and immediately a Degree for Men logo appears on the back of everyone’s lab coats. Behind her, a man with the logo emblazoned on his chest waves his arm, seemingly impervious to the flames burning on his hand. (Like users of Degree for Men, he remains cool under fire.) In another episode, Sheriff Carter gets caught in a Groundhog Day experience and re-lives one day over and over again. His day begins in the shower, which he turns off and then immediately reaches for his Degree for Men – first at the start of the episode, and then again after time repeats itself.

Episode seven, “Here Come the Suns,” is certainly the most egregious example of this all-pervasive sponsorship. When a school science project goes awry and creates a second sun directly over the town, Sheriff Carter evacuates the town and then covers himself with a substance that protects against heat, allowing him to return to Eureka and destroy the extra sun. To prepare the viewer for the plotline’s relationship with its corporate sponsorship, the episode begins with another scene in Ms. Thorne’s Consumer Research Lab, where a man douses a dummy with flames as Eva explains: “It’s the latest next-gen technology Zane’s been developing for our sponsor. Over-engineered to keep you cool in the hottest situations.” Crates with Degree for Men labels litter the floor around the dummy.

Blatant, shameless, and silly as this episode-length commercial may be, I don’t believe it’s an entirely negative development for Eureka. Yes, it forces the show to produce episodes like “Here Come the Suns,” where the realization that a “heat protection formula” saves Carter from a star going supernova elicits a classic hand-to-forehead viewer response. Nevertheless, that same winking self-awareness also leads to one of my favorite episodes of the series, “What About Bob?”

The second episode of season three, “What About Bob?” seems like it should be the moment when the show goes irrevocably over the sponsorship cliff, never to return to artistic integrity. This is the episode that first introduces Degree for Men, when Eva Thorne walks into the new lab and clicks the button that turns on everyone’s evil overlord logo. And yet, to fully incorporate this new, self-referential tone, Eureka takes the idea of self-awareness and runs with it, building an entire subplot around the question of what happens when a television show watches itself. In the episode’s main plot, Sheriff Carter and Allison enter a sealed lab made to look like a primordial jungle where several researchers have lived in isolation for years. As Carter and Allison investigate the mysterious disappearance of one of the scientists, Carter’s daughter Zoë and several minor townspeople characters gather to watch events inside Lab 27 from a hijacked security feed.

The security feed from Lab 27 works like a reality show within Eureka, complete with rabid fan base, viewing parties, and excessive viewer commentary. Zoë watches because she’s worried about her dad, but everyone else watches for the drama. “You’ve gotta admit, the injection of new talent has really made this show fresh again,” Fargo says. Vince wonders “which one of the scientists is the red herring?” and Lucas suggests that “the arrival of Sheriff Carter has made it more procedural.” Comments like this, particularly Lucas’ suggestion that Carter makes what was a science-based show more like a cop show, broaden the self-referential eye forced on Eureka by Degree for Men to include the entire project of the show. What could have been a completely bizarre standalone moment of commercial self-awareness becomes a well integrated part of the episode.

And even when Degree for Men doesn’t kick off a metatextual lovefest, Eva Thorne makes arguments for what’s happening to Global Dynamics that are clearly meant to justify the changes in Eureka as well. “We’ve gotta start saving somewhere,” she says, and Zane makes the point even more plainly. “If we come up with a hot product in here, maybe Ms. Thorne won’t have to make so many cutbacks.” In other words, we’ve gotta sell advertising on this show somehow, viewer, and if this Degree for Men thing works, maybe we can afford to make a full season’s worth of episodes rather than stopping at just nine.

It’s hard to vilify shows that rely on sponsors to stay on the air, especially excellent and nearly-extinct shows like Chuck. (Thank you Subway and Alan Sepinwall). Do I wish it weren’t necessary to sell out in such a spectacularly thorough way? Certainly. But for the most part, Eureka manages the shift with characteristic charm and good humor, and the ability to laugh at itself smoothes over the many of the painfully obvious deodorant moments. I don’t know what will happen when season three comes back next week, but I assume from the continuing existence of pages like this one that the sponsorship will continue.

I’ve been watching a lot of Eureka lately. It’s coming back to the new SyFy¹ next week, which I’m excited about, but it really came to my attention as a show to think about when it became a topic of conversation among some sciencey people as a show they really like. I was a little surprised at its popularity, because it always seemed to me like one of those shows where the fiction overtakes the bounds of scientific plausibility (something that doesn’t really bother me, but is roundly disdained by others in my household). The more I watch, though, the more it seems like an important example of the possibility of a non-mediocre middle ground.

Eureka’s premise is that a charming, common sense, everyman, All-American guy named Jack Carter gets assigned to be the sheriff of Eureka, a top secret town full of geniuses. Most of the town is employed by Global Dynamics, a hidden facility sanctioned by the government and designed to create world changing scientific advances. Sheriff Carter’s job is to wade through the daily catastrophes associated with the creation of artificially intelligent military drones, satellites that beam aggression from space, devices that erase memory, etc. etc., while also administering common sense justice against those who use their geniusy powers for selfish purposes. He may not be able to spell corporeal, but he sure can sniff out a bad guy.

Mishap at the Eureka Dog Show

This premise allows Eureka to have its science fiction both ways – it reveres its genius townspeople, it delights in its super geeky setting, but the viewer’s experience of the scifi wackiness is always mediated by Sheriff Carter’s everyman perspective. The space that gets carved out between Carter and everyone else defines the show’s scifi-meets-real-life appeal: Carter lives in an omniscient smart house named Sarah who can anticipate his every need, but who nevertheless gets pissed off when he’s late for dinner. The town hot spot, Café Diem, lets you order anything you can possibly think of and prepares it out of its fission-run, warehouse-sized freezer, but Carter really just wants a burger. Science fair day at the Tesla School for Advanced Learning includes one entry that promises to be the next major development in medical digital imaging, but the school is still ruled by a coterie of gorgeous evil genius girls who mercilessly mock Carter’s daughter Zoë. Eureka lets the viewer imagine awesome scientific advances in the context of recognizable real life, while refusing to condescend either to its slightly stupid main character or its non-genius audience.

The middle ground here comes primarily out of the show’s combination of Carter’s police procedural street smarts and the scifi genre invisible man explodiness, but the impressive resistance to mediocrity comes largely out of its sheer quirkiness. The tone is set by the show’s opening credits, a ridiculously catchy cheerful whistling melody punctuated by odd minor intervals and a piano/washboard backup. That homespun whistle calls back to the Andy Griffith Show backbone that is built into Eureka, but those unexpected intervals cannily inform you that Carter’s Main St. is a different kind of place than Andy’s. Outside of the really masterful main credits, Eureka indulges in a familiar, comforting silliness – lots of covered-in-goo gags, geeky call outs to Doctor Who and Star Wars, Carter’s house is actually a woman jokes, and the unending, ever satisfying encounters between Carter and the scientists he tries to police.² The silliness, though, rarely falls from pleasurable familiarity into boring predictability. New monsters of the week, inventive solutions to mundane problems (your clothes keep cleaning themselves after you take them to the dry cleaners!), and the occasional ring of emotional sincerity prevent the premise from exhausting itself.

Eureka Main Street

Eureka’s writing, while fun, never really elevates it beyond its genre fiction format, and it certainly does not challenge the audience to examine their own lives or confront the existential futility of modern institutions or require them to follow seventeen interwoven plotlines. Still, its pleasant veneer of glossy entertainment acts less as a shell that disguises an empty core and more like a stylistic safety bubble. Inside the bubble, you can forget the implausibility of shared dreaming and instead snicker when the whole town experiences Sheriff Carter’s classic forgot-to-wear-clothes-to-work nightmare. Buried safely within the slick layer of quirk, you’re encouraged to set aside your fake science alert radar and resign yourself to comfortable, imaginative fictional pleasure. Eureka doesn’t take itself too seriously, but its premise and tone do offer some deeper insights. It is an amiable, friendly show, ultimately optimistic about science, the future, and human nature, and full of enough style and imagination to guard against blandness. It lauds common sense without dissing nerdiness, it values loving human relationships without devolving into sappiness (okay, it’s a little sappy), and even as it laughs at itself, it does so without undermining its own project.

All of which is not to say that Eureka is perfect – it certainly isn’t. Some monsters of the week fail to create an appropriate amount of panic, and the origin of any given problem is pretty repetitive (“You say there’s a problem with the flow of time? Who at Global Dynamics is working on a project about time? Lots of space debris headed our way? Say, isn’t someone at Global Dynamics working on a space debris thingy?”). And then there’s the issue of Degree for Men Absolute Protection, which… is a topic for another day. Still, at its best moments, Eureka allows the audience to imagine a future of scientific advances like clean water and air, vaccines for all diseases, and the end of drought and hunger, but it’s difficult to appreciate them from a large-scale perspective. Instead, we experience this edenic future within a familiar, American small town, full of self-cleaning clothes, cars that drive themselves, and houses that have dinner ready when you come home.

¹Yeah, that stupid rebranding is a whole different blog post.

²Carter, to evil scientist: “I’m on to you. I know you have a device that can create a worm hole, or uh, bend time, or make you invisible – a wormholing, timebending, invisibling device that…shields you from the mind.”

Pause.

Other scientist: “Yes. He said invisibling.”