mad-men

Defamer Predicts the 2008 Emmys: The Dramas

Kyle Buchanan · 09/19/08 01:50PM

We've already run through our predictions for Emmy's comedy categories, but now it's time to sit down for forty-four minutes (excepting commercials) and soberly judge this year's crop of dramas. Again, we'll be blogging the Emmys live from the East Coast starting at 7pm EDT/4pm PDT, so if Mariska Hargitay lets loose with an expletive-laden diatribe or Jeremy Piven has a nip slip on the red carpet, you can be sure we've got it covered. Now, onto the predictions:Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series Boston Legal - James Spader Breaking Bad - Bryan Cranston Dexter - Michael C. Hall House - Hugh Laurie In Treatment - Gabriel Byrne Mad Men - Jon Hamm Don't even bother, House fans. Though Hugh Laurie turned in the compelling, two-hour season finale as his submission, Emmy voters love three-time winner James Spader, and his submission (which finds him passionately arguing a case before the Supreme Court) provides Spader with his biggest tour-de-force yet. If he's ever to lose, it won't be this year. Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series Brothers & Sisters - Sally Field The Closer - Kyra Sedgwick Damages - Glenn Close Law & Order: Special Victims Unit - Mariska Hargitay Saving Grace - Holly Hunter A toss-up! In a category filled with film refugees deigning to do TV (which Emmy loves), Sally Field won last year and notoriously gave a bleeped speech that will only solidify her as the incumbent in voters' memories. Her biggest threat is the cool, nefarious Close, but we'll side with inertia and predict Field as the winner once more. Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series Boston Legal - William Shatner Damages - Ted Danson Damages - Zeljko Ivanek Lost - Michael Emerson Mad Men - John Slattery All but two of the nominees are newcomers to this category, and last year's winner Terry O'Quinn is nowhere to be found. We think voters will reward his co-star, Lost MVP Michael Emerson, whose blockbuster episode submission included horse-riding, piano playing, action scenes, foreign languages, and a juicy scene grieving the death of his daughter. Plus, Emerson is no Emmy novice: he won the award in 2001 for guest-starring on The Practice. Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series Boston Legal - Candice Bergen Brothers & Sisters - Rachel Griffiths Grey's Anatomy - Sandra Oh Grey's Anatomy - Chandra Wilson In Treatment - Dianne Wiest If the category seems oddly mild this year, it's because of 2007 winner Katherine Heigl's infamous decision to pull her name out of consideration. As a reward to the co-stars who bit their lips and suffered in silence, we expect either Oh or Wilson to pull through as the winner, with a slight edge to Oh (after all, she once had to deal with Isaiah Washington, too). Outstanding Drama Series Boston Legal Damages Dexter House Lost Mad Men For party crashers Damages and Dexter, it's an honor just to be nominated. Like them, Mad Men is little-seen, but the difference is that it's watched by all the right people (and heavily appeals to older Emmy voters), so we expect a first-season surge to victory. What Would Don Draper Do if he had to go home empty-handed?

Jon Hamm Disses 'Crazy Showbiz Guy' Regis Philbin

Mark Graham · 09/15/08 08:10PM

Aspiring celebrities about to make your first rounds on the talk show circuit, take note. Earlier this year, we cautioned you regarding the pitfalls of repeating the same anecdote word-for-word on multiple talk show appearances, using Jason Segal's penis-bearing fable as our example. Tonight, we'd like to walk through the subtle art of how to recognize what kind of stories are good for dinner parties versus those that are suitable to be told to a national television audience, showcasing Mad Men star Jon Hamm's disastrously disrespectful appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Friday night.In this clip cut together by our very own Molly McAleer, you'll see two sides of the very same story coming together and then exploding before your very eyes. Here's a quick primer. You see, Mr. Don Draper himself, Jon Hamm, appeared on the Live With Regis And Kelly show on Thursday morning. Little did he know, both Regis and his wife are huge fans of the show Mad Men. They're such big fans, in fact, that the 77-year-old Regis thought it would be fun to spend a little time after the show with Hamm, going as far as to invite him over to the Philbin's apartment. Being the good sport that he is, Hamm agreed to hang with Reege and Joy for a few hours, posing for pictures and making small talk until other obligations rescued him from what was undoubtedly an awkward situation. Up until this point, it was a win/win for all parties involved. Hamm endeared himself to a showbiz legend and Reege got to hang with an actor who likely reminds him of his 1960s glory days. (As you'll see in the clip above, Regis is still beaming four days later.) However, Hamm submarined himself by being unable to hold his tongue about how he really felt about spending time with the Philbins when he came on Kimmel's show on Friday night. Rather than save the story of Regis' wacky behavior for the afterparty in the green room of the El Capitan, he made the cardinal mistake of derisively referring to one of Hollywood's most endearing and popular fixtures as "an elfin force of nature" and a "crazy showbiz guy." Boo! Jon, we know your intentions were in the right place. You were on your friend's show, you had a great story and you just wanted to make the audience laugh. However, poking fun at a beloved institution like Regis is miles apart from poking fun at a tired old windbag like, say, Larry King. Save the barbs about how "crazy" Regis is for when you're kicking back with a few beers at your buddy Kimmel's house, versus sitting on his chair with cameras trained on you and millions thousands of people watching. If you want your career to have legs, that's a lesson you'll want to learn sooner rather than later.

"Men grow neglectful when wives grow careless"

Hamilton Nolan · 09/11/08 03:15PM

There's an episode of Mad Men (I told you I must relentlessly mine this show to catch up with every other ad writer) in which Sterling Cooper has to come up with an ad campaign for a stimulating "weight loss" machine that actually owes its popularity with women to the fact that it's an undercover vibrator. Cue the euphemisms: "Rejuvenator," "youthful glow," etc. Today, of course, euphemism is dead. The agency would sell the product with "Turn it on and cum!" So it makes us wistful to look back on how they sold embarrassing things in the good old days. (With sexism!). After the jump, classic ads that gently persuaded your grandparents to choose the right brand when they were feeling... not so fresh:

'Mad Men' Creator Matthew Weiner Knows How To Sell Himself

Seth Abramovitch · 09/05/08 01:20PM

So Mad Men creator/EP/spiritual shepherd Matthew Weiner realizes he's sitting on something pretty special with his cast of desk-hopping, Brylcreemed creatives over at Sterling Cooper. Perhaps it was the 16 Emmy nominations that tipped him off. ("Don't think of them as Emmy awards," his inner Don Draper will intone on the big night, "Think of them as tiny angels, flapping their pointy wings to a place where fear doesn't live. They're saying, 'You are OK, Matt...It's all...OK.'") Weiner's contract with the show's studio, Lionsgate TV, is up at the end of this season, and Variety reports he's been shopping himself around town to the highest bidder:

50 Years Of Stagnation

Hamilton Nolan · 09/04/08 10:41AM

Now that I've started getting Mad Men on Netflix, I plan to catch up with every other ad critic in the past year by cleverly inserting a reference to the show into each advertising-related item that I write. In this way we seduce you with a connection to a piece of pop culture detritus you enjoy, then use that as a catapult into our sales pitch, represented in this case by a plea for you to read the rest of this post, with the implied promise that it will be worth your while. So, remember that Mad Men episode where they're all marveling at the Volkswagen "Lemon" ad? That particular ad was a breakthrough just because of its honest, direct style. It was the opposite of Lucky Strikes' "It's Toasted" campaign—an equivalent would have been something like "Lucky Strikes—you'll die but you like them anyways." VW continued on a streak of spot-on advertising that spanned at least the next two decades. Look at this classic VW TV spot and ask yourself, has advertising advanced past this yet, idea-wise?

The Mock Cover

Nick Denton · 08/28/08 02:52PM

The spoof cover is an increasingly popular way to establish a character. Witness the fake issue of Wired flashed on the screen during a video tribute to Iron Man's arms manufacturer, Robert Downey's character, Tony Stark. HBO rival Showtime has borrowed the technique to advertise the new season of their tentpole show, the serial-killer drama Dexter, sacrificing a little authenticity for branding impact: Dexter's name is rendered in the style of the Wired and Rolling Stone logos, but replaces the magazines' names. (One assumes these fake covers will run on the back pages of the respective magazines.) But our current favorite is the mini-issue at the back of the latest Advertising Age, a 16-page 1960s version of the ad trade mag designed to promote AMC's critically-acclaimed show Mad Men-and Initiative, the agency that organized the innovative campaign. A scan after the jump:

'Mad Men' TwitterGate: Honest Brand Management or Savvy Network Plug?

STV · 08/26/08 07:40PM

For the 987 readers (whoops — make that 988 and counting since starting this sentence) following "Don Draper"'s Twitter feed, today was an unusually turbulent day at Sterling Cooper Ad Agency. Same thing for the 1,207 folks following "Peggy Olson." You might have been among them, frozen out when AMC reportedly turned to Twitter with complaints about the Mad Men characters posting regular "updates" on the service — discussions which, for whatever reason, resulted in Twitter admin suspending a handful of feeds today until the a fan and media backlash supposedly helped whip them back into place a few hours later. And while at least one AMC critic accused the network of history's "single worst use (misuse?) of social media," other observers seemed baffled that AMC would endanger free advertising. AMC insists that wasn't its plan, and we believe it: If a brief outage could virally promote Mad Men's unofficially official Twitter sites for most of the morning — to the tune of a few hundred new followers in the middle of the series' worst ratings slump — we would have done the same thing ourselves.Sure it's cynical, but hey — Twitter's founders will tell you themselves they "spend more money than [they] make," and a viral scandal seems a reasonably healthy win-win: AMC takes some geek heat in a slow news week. Twitter gets play for its viral-marketing value and influence. Don, Peggy, Bert Cooper and co. get to take the morning off. Mad Men rebounds after Labor Day — new episodes, Twitter feeds, DVD sets and all. The worst part? AMC can never admit brilliantly framing itself in a week when no one is following any news that's not coming out of Denver. Anyway, call us contrarians, but we applaud everyone involved. Especially the 25 people who've grabbed Don Draper's feed in the time it's taken to write this item. Someone's got good taste.

TV's "Mad Men" come to Twitter

Nicholas Carlson · 08/26/08 02:40PM

Fans of AMC's 1960s period drama "Mad Men," have created a series of Twitter accounts impersonating characters from the show's ad agency. Better check them out now: AMC lawyers have already filed legal notices with Twitter demanding their removal. Don Draper and Joan Halloway's accounts are already gone. Obviously, that's a mistake on the part of the cable channel.Star Wars creator George Lucas may not know how to make a movie anymore, but he at least he knows letting Star Wars fans live out weird fantasies by writing fan fiction and posting it on the Web will only help sell more merchandise in the end. "Mad Men" is a hit on both coasts — some say it's retro costumes are starting to impact men's fashion — it's not a Star Wars-sized hit at all and really can't afford to thumb its nose at fans willing to waste their time promoting the show. Here are some of fans' more successful Twitter impersonations below.

Mad Men's Twitter-Related Kerfuffle

Richard Lawson · 08/26/08 12:15PM

O Great Internet, what silly and almost nonsensical story do you have for us today? Ah, one about Twitter and the excellent AMC drama series Mad Men. For a couple of weeks now, "employees" at the fictional advertising agency Sterling Cooper have been sending Twitter messages to each other and other users, hinting at events on the show and just creating a sort of second internet world for the series. And now, of course, people have intervened and the whole thing has been shut down. What could have been cleverly co-opted and adapted into a subtle viral marketing campaign has now been yanked from the interwaves (most likely by reactionary lawyers, our ad dept suspects), deeply upsetting committed yet attention-deficit Twitterers. This is reminiscent of NBC's rabid squashing of any content on YouTube that relates to its shows. I can understand entire episodes being pulled, but little clips here and there seem to increase buzz and to potentially earn the shows (specifically SNL) some new fans. While on a smaller scale than NBC's watchdoggery, folks at AMC cited the Digital Millennium Copyright Act when they silenced the tweets-essentially calling the one or two sentences-long Twitter messages (Twitter messages!!! I hardly know what those are!) unauthorized fanfiction, and therefore verboten. As Alejandra Ramos points out, it's pretty ironic that the show about advertising fails to recognize a good opportunity to... advertise.

How To Talk About Fall Television (That You Might Not Be Watching)

Richard Lawson · 08/20/08 03:28PM

That slight crisp in the air this morning signals to us that autumn is fast approaching, with its hayrides and pumpkin picking and legion of miserable children tromping off to their imagined doom. But also it means television, sweet and glorious non-off-season TV like Gossip Girl and, um... other... shows. Many other shows! So many, in fact, that you can't-even with the aid of DVR techmologies-be expected to watch them all. But in this increasingly (for the past few hundred years) pop-driven culture, it's important that you are least able to talk about the zeitgeistiest shows out there, so after the jump we'll give you a few key talking points for some of the most buzzed about series soon to be (or, in a few cases, that already are) flickering on your idiot box. SUNDAY

Signore Clooney, Signore Clooney! Stop, Please Check Out My Spec Script!

Douglas Reinhardt · 08/11/08 11:00AM

While out burning rubber with his motorcycle gang in Italy, popular actor/director/producer George Clooney was hounded by an aspiring writer. The writer had been waiting for face time with the Oscar winner for nearly four days, during which time she completed four rewrites of her blockbuster script. The woman described her spec as Mad Men meets Silent Running by way of Judd Apatow and believed it to be the perfect vehicle for the Cloonester. The woman said, "Nobody has pushed the limits of the science fiction genre quite this hard and I think George is the perfect individual to bring this unique vision to the screen." Clooney instructed the woman to leave a copy of her script at a nearby coffee bar and he'd pick it up right after his ride.

The Top 10 Female TV Characters Women Want To Be Like And Men Want To Be With

Seth Abramovitch · 08/07/08 05:05PM

You didn't think we'd post last week's Top Ten of the coolest male TV characters without following up with one dedicated to all the honeys, now, did you? And while our definitive men's list—checked and rechecked by a panel of TV experts canvassed at various local correctional facilities and gourmet coffee outlets—surprisingly met with some vocal opposition, we're confident its vagina-filled counterpart will please even the most persnickety of TV-lady lovers. There's only one way to know for sure, however. Click play, and decide for yourselves.

The Top 10 TV Characters Men Want To Be Like And Women Want To Be With

Seth Abramovitch · 07/31/08 05:14PM

In browsing What Would Don Draper Do? yesterday —your one-stop Tumblr shop for tips, advice, and musings from everyone's favorite Sterling Cooper jr. partner/secret whore-child—it suddenly occurred to us that there are few people, fictional or real, whose loafers we'd more rather slip into. You know—just to see how it felt to be Donald Draper, shtupping his Jewess department-store-heiress mistress on the side. Which got us further thinking—what other iconic TV characters would we like to be, or do, or maybe both be and do? We left it to the capable hands of Defamer videosmith Molly McAleer to compile this ultimate Top Ten Countdown of TVs Coolest Cats. We're sure you'll agree that each in his own way demonstrated consistent grace under fire, panty-moistening sex appeal, and more cool that a seal hunt in December. And yes, we're well-aware that we left off many of your favorites; that was intentional, as this is the definitive Cool Cat list. Feel free to contribute your own nominees and clips in the comments. In the meantime, take it away, Parker Lewis!

Seth Abramovitch · 07/30/08 04:10PM

Ask Don: Confused? Conflicted? Lingering regrets? Maybe everyone's favorite Madison Ave. iceberg—10% cool exterior, the other 90% lurking beneath the surface—can help you at What Would Don Draper Do: "Dear Don Draper, I was thinking about getting the 3G iPhone. Thoughts?: Stop thinking about it as a phone with a touch screen. Start thinking about it as a way to touch each other." [What Would Don Draper Do?]

'Nine' Now Literally Stars Everyone With Addition Of Fergie

Seth Abramovitch · 07/21/08 04:40PM

· Fergie has joined the ever-growing cast of the Weinstein Co.'s Nine. In her first role in a major motion picture, she'll play "Saraghina, a lusty woman who introduces [Daniel Day-Lewis's character] to the world of sexuality" by lowering her drawbridge, extending a long straw, and sucking down the frothy contents of his simmering desire. In some ways you could almost say that she'll drink his manshake—she'll drink it up! (Forgive us.) [Variety]
· Mad Men endured another critic-derived facial, being named TCA's program of the year, best new program, and best drama. [Variety]
· British actor James Purefoy close to signing on as the lead in The Philanthropist, an NBC series about "a renegade billionaire who uses his wealth to help people in need no matter the risks or costs" that's loosely based on Donald Trump's life. [THR]
· Selma Blair's new sitcom Kath & Kim will take 30 Rock's 8:30 p.m. Thursday slot, with 30 Rock pitching camp in the far MILF-friendlier environment of 9:30. [THR]
· High School Musical: Get in the Picture underperformed for ABC, curtailing that network's plans for spinoffs High School Musical: My First Internet Photoscandal and Being Miley: The Search for America's Next Virgin Slut. [Variety]

iTunes Steals Mad Men's Smokes

Hamilton Nolan · 07/17/08 03:25PM

The image you see on top is a standard ad for Mad Men, AMC's series about hard-paryting admen in the good old days that conveniently advertises itself everywhere. The image on the bottom is what you see when you visit iTunes to purchase the full season of Mad Men. The difference? On iTunes, the man has had his cigarette taken away. Steve Jobs does not understand the point of this show at all. Click to enlarge the Apple-approved scrubbing of our culture.

Emmy Nomination Hell! 10 Plots and Subplots to Watch After Today's Big Announcements

STV · 07/17/08 10:10AM

The world awoke this morning to the chirping of little birds resembling Kristin Chenoweth and Neil Patrick Harris, perched at a podium in the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, announcing nominations for the 60th Emmy Awards. While most rolled over and tried to get back to sleep, we sat bolt upright as usual and sprinted to the window, our furious note-taking chronicling a few snubs, surprises and plenty of the conventional wisdom we've come to expect from the annual ritual.

The Wire Was Robbed

Nick Denton · 07/17/08 09:18AM

All these shows-nominated either for best dramatic series (the first six) or best comedy series (the latter five) in this year's Emmys-are perfectly worthy contenders. And the final season of The Wire, HBO's gritty drama set in a corrupt and decaying Baltimore, wasn't quite the climax that fans of the David Simon show had hoped for. But it's an injustice that such a brilliant piece of work, which turned the dismal failures of public policy into heartbreaking human tragedy, should have ended its run without a single nod.

Ads For Ad Show Swallow Commuters

Hamilton Nolan · 07/14/08 05:21PM

The New York subway system is taking full advantage of its plan to sell all flat surfaces for advertising, including the outside of trains. The latest and most appropriate sponsor of the metal cattle car that you squeeze yourself into every depressing morning: Mad Men, the acclaimed show about advertising! Even if you barely miss your train as it pulls away, leaving you frustrated and abandoned, you'll still be educated about the existence of Mad Men. Sweet. More pics of the hellaciously busy interior of these message-wielding cars, after the jump.