Hits And Misses

October 27, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

This past weekend Mad Men lead Jon Hamm did a stint hosting Saturday Night Live, and his intro poked funat the conundrum of the AMC show: It’s critically revered, the first basic-cable series to win an Emmy as best drama, yet relatively few people have seen it.

In his SNL intro, Hamm alluded to Mad Men’s relative obscurity. The dark, handsome actor also said that when he tells people the show is on AMC, they ask him if he doesn’t mean A&E.

Unlike programs that have become populist-culture phenomenon, like South Park and The Sopranos, I can’t talk to my sister and other assorted family members about Mad Men. While I love it, they don’t watch it.

Mad Men, which looks at 1960’s moirés via life at a New York ad agency, hasn’t been garner...Read More

September 22, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Forgive me for any typos or misspellings because I’ve just ended my evening of post-Emmy festivities. It’s 1:30 a.m. PST, and I’m jetlagged after coming to L.A. Saturday from New York. It’s been a busy night.

The Governor’s Ball after the 60^th Primetime Emmy Awards ceremony was held in the Los Angeles Convention Center, which was beautifully redecorated with red carpet and crystal saucer-shaped lights, the walls made to look like a starry dark blue night.

Networks that turned out to be some of the big winners Sunday night – namely AMC and FX – had tables in sections raised above the main floor on the side of the room.

Surprise winner Bryan Cranston for AMC’s Breaking Bad was joyously posing for congratulatory photos, and the whole joint was packed.

Outside the hall, M...Read More

September 10, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (15)

I don’t know if HBO’s True Blood will be a hit, but it had me at hello with its opening credits.

Alessandra Stanley, the TV critic for The New York Times went so far as to describe the show’s opening montage as “amazing, hallucinatory,” and suggested that the actual show didn’t live up to its introduction.    

The vampire opus True Blood, from Six Feet Under creator Alan Ball, is set in a swamp-water hamlet in Louisiana. In the opening montage, we see: shots of the bayou; the KKK; gators; African-Americans in their church; possum road kill; rednecks whopping it up in a bar; a writhing dancer; a rotting fox (in time lapse, with maggots destroying the carcass); a striking snake; a Venus flytrap devouring prey; and an evangelical baptism in a river, among other thin...Read More

August 22, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

Cable’s given us a crop of 40-something female protagonists, flawed and antiheroic, in the past few years. Two of them have been police detectives, portrayed byHolly Hunter in Saving Grace and Kyra Sedgwick in The Closer, both on TNT.

Hunter’s character is hard-drinking and promiscuous, sleeping with her married colleague and parading around naked in front of a window for her elderly next-door neighbor. Sedgwick’s is a neurotic sugar-lover.

But next month, FX is bringing America a female character who is an antihero in the tradition of Vic Mackey in The Shield: She’s murderous, right from the get-go, in the show’s first episode. And that character—a hard-ass motorcycle club matriarch in the new drama Sons of Anarchy—is played by none other than Katey Sagal of Married &he...Read More

July 15, 2008 | Link This | Email this | Comments (0)

I’m not sure if Mad Men executive producer Matt Weiner was tongue-in-cheek joking or not when he asked TV critics touring the show’s set Tuesday not to walk off with any souvenirs.

“Please be respectful of the set, and we say this to everyone who comes to visit: Don’t take anything,” Weiner told several busloads of writers assembled for the set visit. “This is like Pompeii. You see the bones in the walls, they are irreplaceable. Some of this stuff has really been hard to find.”

But then Weiner enthusiastically escorted writers around the set he so obviously loves, located at the LA Center Studios in downtown Los Angeles.

AMC’s Mad Men—a period piece about an enigmatic crew working at the Sterling Cooper ad agency in the early 1960s on Madison Avenue, is the ...Read More