Category: TV

Mad Men is a new original TV series airing on American Movie Classics. Created by The Sopranos writer and executive producer Matthew Weiner, the show, set in 1960, focuses on the lives of the employees of Sterling Cooper, a fictional New York advertising agency. The contrast between the behavior of Sterling Cooper’s employees and the folkways of any modern office could not be more striking: Sterling Cooper is run like a Good Old Boy’s club. Employees chain-smoke at their desks or in meetings, swill whiskey and scotch at every given opportunity (they even have Bloody Mary “eyeopeners” in the breakroom on occasion!), and treat the women in the office more like an escort service than a steno pool. What’s more, the women even seem to put up with it! The things these guys do on a normal day in 1960 could get you fired instantly in 2007.

The protagonist of the show is Don Draper (played by John Hamm). Don is the creative director of Sterling Cooper. He has the respect and admiration of most of the firm’s employees. He is frequently courted by rival firms offering him huge raises and other perks. He even has a huge house in the suburbs and two beautiful kids. In almost every way, Don appears to lead the perfect life. But Don isn’t happy. Don’s harboring a dark secret. We don’t know much about his past, and Don’s not giving us any reason why.

Like a lot of the boys at Sterling Cooper, Don is unabashedly having affairs. One was with Midge Daniels (Rosemarie DeWitt from Fox’s Standoff), a pot-smoking, beatnik-type. The other is with Rachel Menken (Maggie Siff), the owner of a department store and one of Don’s clients. What I don’t get is… why? Have you seen his wife?

What a moron! Betty Draper (played by January Jones) is, like, so much hotter than those other chicks!

Anyway, Mad Men is a great show – one of the best on TV right now. Here’s a link to AMC’s official site, and here’s a link to Wikipedia’s Mad Men page (warning: Wikipedia’s page has spoilers!). The show starts off kind of slowly, but if you can make it through the first two episodes, I promise that you’ll be hooked!

As you probably know, the character “Creed” in the American version of The Office is played by a man named Creed Bratton. Bratton was a member of the 60s group The Grass Roots. He plays an exaggerated parody of himself on the show. Just for kicks, here’s a YouTube video of Creed and the rest of The Grass Roots from an appearance on The Jimmy Durante Show. Creed is on the left, in the back and white striped sweater. Check out his solo!

The FX original series Damages is kind of like Lost, only it takes place in law offices instead of a tropical island.

The basics of the show are thus: billionaire Arthur Frobisher (Ted Danson) has been cleared by the Feds in the “Enron-style” meltdown of his company. A prominent New York attorney (Patty Hewes, played by Glenn Close) is leading a civil case against Frobisher on behalf of his former employees. We enter the show as a young, “just out of law school” attorney (Ellen Parsons, played by Rose Byrne) is entertaining offers from Hewes and Ellis Nye, another New York attorney. Ellen takes the job with Hewes… and her life is changed forever.

This might sound fairly straightforward so far… but soon lies are told, conspiracies are hatched, and no one is as good or honest as they seem. Double-crosses pile up and turn in to triple-crosses and quadruple-crosses. People you think are the good guys turn out to be bad. And the people you initially want to hate turn out to be kind of nice. Like Lost, the show poses questions, and then answers them the next week… only to ask 50 more questions in return. And you have to pay attention when you watch this show: questions may be answered in subtle ways, such as seemly innocent phone calls, peices of paper left here or there… or a single drop of blood.

The show is nearing the end of season 1, but you can still catch up if you’d like. FX is running a 12-hour marathon on October 20th beginning at 8PM. So fire up the DVR and catch one of the best new shows on TV!

Hey, at least Jack In The Box knows who their customers are:

A few days ago, I posted this about the passing of Atlanta DJ “Skinny Bobby” Harper. Harper spent many years at WQXI, and while he was there, a guy named Hugh Wilson worked in the advertising department. Wilson would go on to create WKRP in Cincinnati. As part of the article about Harper, I noted that Wilson based WKRP’s “Dr. Johnny Fever” character on “Skinny Bobby”.

Little did I know that a lot of WKRP was based on Wilson’s time at WQXI. Did you know, for example, that everyone’s favorite episode of WKRP – the one where they dropped live turkeys from helicopters – was based on an actual event? It seems that WQXI DJ Gerry Blum once rented an 18-wheeler, filled it full of live turkeys, and tossed them out the back at a parking lot of an Atlanta shopping center. Whether the truck was moving or stationary, I do not know. Blum was also behind the “dancing ducks” promotion – something WKRP ripped off wholesale – where ducks were made to “dance” by putting them on hot plates (presumably kept high enough to make them uncomfortable, but low enough not to burn them). It’s hard to imagine a radio station getting away with either of these promotions today!

Lastly, contrary to anything you might have heard from rabid WKRP fans (and believe it or not, there are rapid WKRP fans), the show’s closing theme does not have lyrics. Well, it does have lyrics, but they’re gibberish. The song was written and performed by Jim Ellis, an Atlanta musician (another Atlanta connection!). While he was working on the song, he used gibberish lyrics just to see how the song sounded overall. Wilson loved the song “as-is”, plus he knew that CBS would have an announcer talking during the end credits – so no one would ever heard it anyway. So he told Ellis to record it exactly as it was on the demo tape that he’d heard.

Did you know that Sunday’s episode of Family Guy was censored for American television? The bits that were cut weren’t that funny in my opinion, although the premise is pretty clever: you know how Fox loves those animated “crawlers” (advertisements) at the bottom of the screen? Imagine what would happen if Marge Simpson met Quagmire in one:

Sorry for the low-quality capture. It was apparently done with a cell phone camera pointed at the TV screen. I haven’t seen a scene rip of this, but if I do, I’ll let you know!

Wanna know what the gang in Scranton did over the summer? Check out this promo from NBC: