Mad Men

The "will he or won't he" saga that has become Matthew Weiner's return to a third season of Mad Men looks perilously close to reaching "won't he". According to intrepid Hollywood bomb thrower Nikki Finke, Lionsgate, the studio responsible for producing Mad Men, has been furiously calling agencies around Hollywood looking for names of replacement show runners to usurp Mr. Weiner going forward. Always wondered what an episode of Mad Men written by Aaron Sorkin might look like? You could have your chance in 2009.

If this seems like yet another chess move in a long line of negotiating tactics between Mr.  read more »

Regular readers The House Next Door's 'Mad Men Mondays' column found a surprising, sad announcement today from the site's founder, Matt Zoller Seitz:

Editor's note: This column is dedicated to the memory of House contributor, Time Out New York editor and regular Mad Men recapper Andrew Johnston, who passed away Sunday, Oct. 26 at age 40, following a long battle with cancer.

Mr. Johnston had been writing the weekly re-cap and analysis column since the first season of the critically-aclaimed AMC series and had a devoted following among readers who looked to his insights and erudition to make sense of Matthew Weiner's layered, novelistic show.  read more »

There is a cloud of uncertainty surrounding Mad Men as its second season draws to a close this weekend. While the show has been picked up for a no-brainer third season, both series creator Matthew Weiner and series star Jon Hamm have yet to commit beyond season two. Uh-oh. We don't even want to contemplate a world without the existence of Mad Men. Thankfully, the ABC promo department is here to help take our minds off things. They've been kind enough to release a teaser for the fifth season of Lost. We've watched the thing 20 times since it popped up online last night and can report it's as terrific as you would anticipate.  read more »

Could Sterling-Cooper actually function without its boss? No, we aren't talking about Don Draper, who's presumably still wandering around the hills of California looking to meet with whatever mysterious person knew him as Dick Whitman... we're talking about Matthew Weiner. While Mad Men has been picked up by AMC for a third season, the show's mastermind and Lionsgate, the studio that produces Mad Men, have yet to agree to a deal. Uh-oh.

Naturally, Mr. Weiner is trying to get a sum of money commensurate with Mad Men's incredible buzz and seemingly non-stop plaudits. Even before an Emmy win for Best Drama,  read more »

Felix Gillette and John Koblin attended a conference of media folks at Time Warner Center and saw, "dark days. Banks, churches, newspapers, the presidency—all in decline."

Don't forget publishing, since, according to Leon Neyfakh, "At hand is the twilight of an era most did not expect to miss, but will."

Plus: Oliver Stone... Mad Men... Saturday Night Live.

At the September 21st Emmy Awards AMC cleaned up: Mad Men became the first basic cable series to win best drama (and won for writing, too), and Bryan Cranston had a surprise win in the best actor category for Breaking Bad. And the network is not stopping there.  read more »

Yahoo! and Jon Hamm (Don Draper on Mad Men) broke out the whiskey yesterday in celebration of APT, the media company's new digital advertising system (check out the site here). At a press conference in New York, in celebration of Advertising Week festivities, Mr. Hamm joined Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang and President Sue Decker to talk about how much easier and faster companies can buy online ads with the  Web-based service with a drag-and-drop interface, simple analytics, and an easy-to-use "dashboard." So far, the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News have signed up.

"I do feel a little strange being up in front of a group of people, in front of cameras, talking about advertising, instead of smoking nine cigarettes and drinking three or four glasses of Scotch," Mr.  read more »

Here at the Culture Czar, we've had our eye on Revolutionary Road for some time. Academy Award winner Sam Mendes' adaptation of the depressingly awesome Richard Yates novel, which reunites doomed Titanic lovers Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet, seems like it should be a guaranteed home run: high-pedigree Oscar bait that will also be incredibly watchable and wildly sad. We. Can't. Wait.

However, there was some cause for concern over what Mr. Mendes would do with this material. Granted, he's an adept technical director. His films, without exception, are beautiful to look at, thanks in large part to his brilliant cinematographers like the late Conrad L.  read more »

The 60th Primetime Emmy Awards air Sunday on ABC. And in preparation, we thought it would be fun to give you a little help on your office pool. Welcome to the fifth and final day of our Emmy preview!

We've already handicapped all the acting races, so you should be all set for Sunday. Here, finally, a look at the shows.

Best Comedy Series: Curb Your Enthusiasm; Entourage; The Office; 30 Rock; Two and a Half Men

Who we're pulling for: This might sound counterintuitive, but we hope 30 Rock never finds a mass audience. The second season was so funny and completely bananas, that we wonder if Tina Fey and her cohorts would be able to get away with the stuff they do if people were actually watching.  read more »

Jon Hamm had whiskey breath. On the evening of Wednesday, Sept. 3, Mr. Hamm—the actor who plays Don Draper, the dashing and deceiving creative director in a 1960s Madison Avenue ad house on AMC's Mad Men—was swirling his drink (whiskey with ice, in ... a wine glass) in the window-walled back room of Michael's on 55th Street. Best Life magazine threw him a party celebrating his first time as a cover boy in their September issue.

The Daily Transom was half expecting him to pull out a cigarettte and light up. Instead, he was behaving and checking out the artwork.

"That's a nice painting right there," he said, stopping mid-sentence with a guest to observe a painting of a man looking out on a landscape with his head turned.  read more »

We have to admit, after all the gushing press coverage that Mad Men received before the launch of its second season, we were more than a little concerned. There is example after example of popular watercooler shows hitting a wall in their sophomore year. Call it “The Curse of the Second Season” (see LOST, Desperate Housewives and, most recently, Heroes.) Would Mad Men be able to maintain the effortless excellence of its first year?

Thankfully, thus far, the answer is yes. Through five episodes, we’ve found the second season to be, quite possibly, an improvement on the first. Year two of Mad Men has actually gotten tighter, more focused and more interesting.  read more »

Like everyone else we know, we’ve become a little obsessed with Mad Men. And a late night perusal of IMDB revealed to us the following interesting tidbit: Talia Balsam, who plays Mona Sterling -- wife of the awesomely inappropriate Roger Sterling -- is the real life wife of actor John Slattery, who portrays Roger Sterling. Neat! But, wait there more. Ms. Balsam, whose television credits stretch back to Happy Days, is the niece of Dick Van Patten, and, perhaps more excitingly, the only woman to have married George Clooney. The couple wed after a long courtship in 1989, but split after three years (“Talia and I were together for a long time,” Mr. Clooney told Parade magazine in 1998. “She was the girl I chased and was in love with, the girl I always wanted to marry.”) Mr. Clooney, as we know, has gone on to say he’ll never marry again. Ms. Balsam, on the other hand, married Mr. Slattery, with whom she has a ten-year-old son. This leads us to the conclusion that Talia Balsam has just about the best taste in silver fox men, ever. Madam, we salute you!

Just how historically accurate is AMC's critically acclaimed series Mad Men? Very.

In June, The New York Times Magazine's Alex Witchell called the show's art direction "almost fetishistically accurate." New York Magazine's Logan Hill actually went so far as to examine the books behind one character's desk on the magazine's Vulture blog.

But it's not just the sets that are period perfect. Last night's episode featured a plot point (spoiler alert?) about an American Airlines crash in Jamaica Bay. Here's how The New York Times's Peter Kihss described that crash, on March 1, 1962, in the March 2nd edition of the paper:

Nintety-five persons were killed yesterday in a jet airliner crash in Jamaica Bay.  read more »

The Television Critics Association awards took place on Saturday night in Beverly Hills and one show, predictably, came out on top: AMC's Mad Men.

The TCA awards usually offer a little preview of what to expect from the Emmy's. Mad Men has 16 nominations for that awards show. On Saturday night, the association gave AMC's first nominated show program of the year as well as honors for new program and drama, according to Variety.

Mad Men follows the larger-than-life ad men of the alluring golden age of advertising: "three-martini (sometimes four- or five-) lunches, smoking in the offices, lots of extramarital affairs. (Of course, it was an alluring world largely for men; women were almost entirely confined to the typing pool and the beds of their bosses)," wrote Doree Shafrir for the Observer.

A show that was snubbed by the Emmy's, The Wire, received the Heritage Award, which recognizes a longstanding program that has had a lasting cultural or social impact. David Simon did his song and dance about awards and how newspapers often compromise ethics standards to receive them. But then he joked: “I was completely wrong. It is all about the awards.”

He went on to say that if not for critics’ support, HBO might’ve canceled the series after the third and fourth season.

Here is a full list of TCA's winners, courtesy of the association's website:  read more »

The 60th Annual Emmy Awards nominations have been announced, and as Gillian Reagan points out on our sister blog, Culture Czar, quality television purveyor HBO was shut out of the Best Drama category. There wasn't even a spot for The Wire, which finished its final season beneath an avalanche of critical praise.  read more »

That may not be such a shame according to Time's James Poniewozik, who writes, "Maybe it's more fitting that The Wire can go out with its purity of outrage and injustice intact. And at least an HBO-less drama category may be a little more interesting." HBO might've had a nomination in Mad Men had they not

HBO's critical hit miniseries John Adams made out big at the Emmy announcement this morning with 23 nominations. Twenty-three! God bless America! Although HBO was also recognized for Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Wire, the series that has us wired, was totally snubbed!

AMC's Mad Men, where ad men still had their mojo, garnered 16 noms at the top of the drama series category. That's the first time a basic cable program has topped that list. NBC’s "defending comedy champ," 30 Rock, was the most-recognized series overall, with 17 Emmy bids, according to Variety. The winners will be announced Sept.  read more »

George Lois is nothing if not opinionated. The universally heralded adman and creator of Esquire's most canonical covers from the '60s, shares his take on AMC's Mad Men with The New York Times Magazine's Alex Witchel this week:

When I hear ‘Mad Men,’ it’s the most irritating thing in the world to me. When you think of the ’60s, you think about people like me who changed the advertising and design worlds. The creative revolution was the name of the game. This show gives you the impression it was all three-martini lunches. ...

We worked from 5:30 in the morning until 10 at night.  read more »

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Michael Gladis, the actor currently starring in AMC's series Mad Men, will leave what the Observer's Doree Shafrir called an alluring ad world of "three-martini (sometimes four- or five-) lunches, smoking in the offices, lots of extramarital affairs" for the cold November mountains in Maine, at least, on stage. He will star in an upcoming world premiere staging of Chad Beckim's The Main(e) Play at the Lion Theater.  read more »