Mad Men Needs A Smoke

I like Mad Men. It's entertaining. It has cool sets and clothes (Rambler misses the days when men wore suits every day and even hats--although the hat era was ending in the early 1960s) and lots of smoking and drinking. The plots are sometimes good, but most often it seems to be trying too hard.

What Mad Men isn't is a hit worthy of the blowjob in the New York Times Magazine this Sunday. The lead paragraph says the show is a `hit.' Even by cable standards, Mad Men is not a hit. It is a success for AMC, but not some huge show. In fact, it has a pretty small audience. But why let those pesky facts get in the way of a story. All the writer (or editor) had to do was say "critical hit" or "cultural hit" and that would have been fine.

There is a saying in the reporting biz. There are no new stories, only new reporters. The Mad Men piece is the classic example that proves that adage. Much is made that Mad Men " languished for years after being rejected by HBO and Showtime." Guess what, lots of scripts languish for years. Lots of book ideas languish for years. Hell I've had hard-ons languish for years.

We are also told, as if this is groundbreaking, that Matthew Weiner (which the NYT goes out of the way to tell us is pronounced WHY-ner. Geez, has it come to that? We now have to phonetically spell out a name like Weiner?) wrote the script for Mad Men while working as a writer on Becker. That story, according to the author, is showbiz legend. Really, a writer worked on two projects at once? That's fucking briliant. I never heard of that. What is legend is that Becker lasted as long as it did, but anyway.

The reporter (who, as they all tend to do these days, became part of the story) also goes on to tell us how concerned Weiner is about plot secrets being leaked. Guess what Matthew, no one is hunting down plot secrets for Mad Men.

We also hear again and again how HBO committed the worst sin known to man by passing on Mad Men. Was Weiner, a writer on The Sopranos, dissed by HBO? Probably. Would Mad Men have been some huge hit on HBO like The Sopranos or Sex and the City? Who knows. But networks pass on shows all the time. Fox passed on The Sopranos. And guess what, if Fox had made The Sopranos it would not have been The Sopranos.

And finally, the reporter writes that Mad Men is AMC's first foray into original programming. Yeah, if you don't count Remember WENN which ran for four years back in the 1990s. Apparently the reporter and the fact check couldn't be bothered to do even the most basic homework.

I'm not saying Mad Men isn't worthy of attention, but it doesn't need to be made into soemthing bigger than it is to merit it. I don't think it was worth a cover story, even in the middle of June. Hell, more people have probably read that annoying chick's blog that the New York Times Magazine bored us with a few weeks ago than watch Mad Men. What exactly is the criteria for a cover story at there these days anyway?