DownWithTyranny!

Better Call Saul exec producers Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould watch Bob Odenkirk being made up as Jimmy McGill during filming for Season 3.

by Ken

Bearing in mind how historically tight-fisted Breaking Bad mastermind Vince Gilligan has always been about over-revealing what's to come, it's not entirely surprising that AMC's heralded first sneak peek at Season 3 of Better Call Saul ("First-Look Photos") is noticeably sneakier than peekier.


Okay, this would be the brothers McGill, Chuck (Michael McKean) and Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk), in Chuck's living room.


And this would be Kim (Rhee Seahorn) and Jimmy in an office -- Kim's, it looks like.

In the interest of disclosure, I should note that I've withheld one of the so-called advance pix, which shows Vince Gilligan and Bob Odenkirk sitting on a bench. Oh, what the hell, just to prove that I wasn't suppressing vital visual information:



So now you've seen all of the "first look" pics. For the record, here's what the AMC folks have to say as they share these breathlessly revealing snaps (links onsite):

Season 2 of Better Call Saul left off with Jimmy McGill in a dark place — even if he didn’t know it. After finally coming clean to Chuck about sabotaging his case, Jimmy was relieved to stop lying to his brother. Unfortunately, Chuck seemed to have other plans when he revealed the tape recorder that now contains every last word of Jimmy’s confession.

So, where do things stand when Season 3 begins? These first-look photos offer a glimpse into Jimmy’s shaky relationships with both Chuck and Kim. Plus: It looks like we’ll be seeing Jimmy/Saul’s alter ego Gene once again as well!

Better Call Saul returns 2017. Be the first to receive show exclusives and updates by signing up for the Better Call Saul Insider’s Club.

I just thought that for anyone who was thinking there's not a whole lot to look forward to in 2017, well, here's something.

Labels: AMC, Better Call Saul, TV Watch

Labels: AMC, Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, TV Watch

I assumed we could get some sort of relevant clip from the Mad Men page of the AMC website, but right now it's a pile of worthless, stinking crap, at least on the browsers I have available as I write. (Confidential to Web designers who think all of their clients' potential users chase the latest browsers: Get your heads out of your butts, morons. And to the clients thusly hornswoggled: Oh jeez!) So we have to settle for this "cast's favorite scenes" feature, which you should find here. Above, of course, we see Elisabeth Moss (Peggy Olson), January Jones (Betty Francis), John Slattery (Roger Sterling), and Christina Hendricks (Joan Harris).

by Ken

A lot of Mad Men fans seem to be. And we know that, at least as of the end of last week's episode, "The Milk and Honey Route," poor Henry Francis (Christopher Stanley) was still reeling. Whereas, perhaps surprisingly, Betty herself (January Jones) wasn't. Consider that there aren't many people who know Betty better than daughter Sally Draper (Kiernan Shipka), and it was Sally who assumed that the news would bring out her mother's drama-queeniness.

Among many other things, it was a big Sally episode, confirming what we've already known and noted repeatedly: how interestingly Kiernan Shipka has grown up over these years, and how ably she can handle whatever series creator Matthew Weiner and his team ask her to do. There was a wonderful low-key ease and playfulness to her long-distance phone conversation with Don (Jon Hamm), high drama in the unexpected visit she received at school from stepfather Henry, the combination of updated ancient routine and event-driven edge as she found herself back in the kitchen sitting with her out-of-the-loop little brothers, and of course the great scene with her mother.

It was all around, I thought, an exceptionally fine episode, with Don off on his quest-or-whatever-the-hell-it-is; Betty pursuing her long-delayed college degree; the left-behinds at what's left of the erstwhile Sterling Cooper team scrambling toward their new lives in the new agency world; and in particular Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser), lured into an enervating entanglement with our old friend adman-turned-headhunter Duck Phillips (Mark Moses), deciding to go all out for an unexpected rearrangement of his future.

This last plotline that meant not just for another extendsive appearance by one of the series' most wonderful actors and characters, Alison Brie as Trudy Campbell, but as a mile marker for the life distance we've traveled with the show's characters. We began with astonishment way back when that someone as sane and centered and beautiful as Trudy would want anything to do with, let alone consider marrying, the creepy Pete we knew back in Season 1. Now here we are, all these years later, in which Trudy has worked so hard to wall off her feelings for Pete, and it turns out that maybe she was the only one who was right about him. Is there anyone who doesn't wish that, among the fates series Matthew W has in store for his characters, there's something good for Trudy?

I was so impressed by the episode that I was caught up short but also fascinated by a comment from a legendary adman, Tom Messner, who rose through the ranks at Carl Ally (later Ally and Gargano) before going out on his own (widely remembered as the creator of the advertising that put MCI on the telecommunications map), at a nifty panel put on Wednesday night by the Museum of the Moving Image: "The Real Mad Men: A Discussion with Leading Creators and Executives." Tom had gotten to talking about present-day TV, and said how impressed he is by the production values of current shows like Game of Thrones, and by contrast how meager he'd found the produciton values of last week's Mad Men episode, done mostly in simple closeups and two-shots, looking like it was made with a near-zero budget. The panel moderator, Barbara Lippert, a longtime columnist at Adweek and now editor-at-large at the website Media Post, pointed out that Matthew Weiner has complained frequently about the budgetary economies AMC has forced on him.


Meet Tom Messner in Yahoo's Giants of Advertising series.

Also on the panel was Ken Roman, who rose the rank of chairman and CEO of Ogilvy and Mather Worldwide before finding himself at the shaft end of the kind of British-takeover deal that's not unfamiliar to Mad Men viewers, though the MM version, it was suggested was perhaps a decade premature. And providing insighto the TV world's view of the advertising world, there was longtime NBC and RCA high-ranking executive Herb Schlosser (it was under his watch at NBC, and under his order, that Saturday Night Live was created -- though he has always clear that beyond the mandate the actual creation was done by the creative team. And crucially there was Helayne Spivak, who had worked for Tom Messner at Ally and Gargano and subsequenly worked her way up, through, and around the advertising business (she was reported to have told the panel organizers, "I'm Peggy"), and was able to tell us that the show's portrayal of the minimizing and outright abuse of women looked only too familiar to her.

It was a funny and illuminating panel, especially enjoyable for the opportunity to get a little sense of how these four exceptionally successful people had made their ways through their assorted careers. Regarding advertising, one point they agreed on is that they don't recognize the unrelenting angst of the show's portrayal of the advertising business. They did it, agreed all the ad people on the panel, because it was fun. (One other thing the panelists agreed on: None of them was familiar with the term "mad men," which they insist is Matthew Weiner's invention.)

One of the questions that came up was whether in the real world an agency guy could pull a Don Draper and just disappear for a week or a month. Much to my surprise, the general feeling, as articulated first by Ken Roman, was that "those creative types" could get away with just about anything!

In case it isn't obvious, I'm writing today in anticipation of the soon-to-be World of No More Mad Men. For Museum of the Moving Image members, there is at least a grand send-off in the form of a gala celebration Sunday evening culminating in a communal viewing of the final episode, "Person to Person," on the museum's largest screen. I signed up for that as soon as the e-announcement went out, wanting desperately not to be left out. Oh, I'll be recording the episode as well, but I think I'll be happy to see it first in the company of all those other devotees.

For one thing, I'll bet it plays really well on a large screen before an appreciative audience. As I've mentioned here many tiimes, my introduction to The Sopranos was on the not-as-large screen of the not-as-large old Museum of the Moving Image, the summer when the first show's first two seasons were binge-screened (before there was such a thing!) at an eight-episode-a-weekend clip, a project that was curated -- and is, understandably, still fondly remembered -- by the museum's current chief curator, David Schwartz. And wildly fondly remembered by me. For a newcomer to the show, it was an amazing immersion -- seeing not just how remarakable those two seasons' worth of episodes were but seeing how amazingly good they looked on a movie-theater-size screen, and how well they played to a live audience.

I know there's a popular impression that we're now in a golden age of grown-up cable TV drama, but that isn't how it looks to me. The way I see it, there was Oz and The Wire and The Sopranos and Mad Men and Breaking Bad, and maybe a few honorable mentions (Boardwalk Empire had its attractions, and I stuck it out with Tremé, crazy as it drove me at times). And then?

Labels: AMC, Mad Men, Museum of the Moving Image, The Sopranos

Look who's back! Last week Sally (Kiernan Shipka) got an unexpected visit from old pal Glen (Marten Weiner), in No. 3 of the final seven episodes of Mad Men. No. 4 airs tonight.)

by Ken

It must have been at the Museum of the Moving Image's Mad Men exhibition that I ran into someone I know fairly slightly, and on seeing something related to Don and Betty Draper's (or should I say "Don Draper's and Betty Francis's"?) eldest offspring, daughter Sally, and my acquaintance commented how fortunate the producers had been in the way actress Kiernan Shipka had grown up over the course of the show's many years, and of course I had to agree.

This is of course a basic fact of life in a show with kids which has an extended run. You can audition till you're blue in the face to get just the right kiddies for Season 1, but you have no idea what, or rather who, you're going to be dealing with if you're lucky enough to get to a Season 5 or 6 or 7. And while I don't doubt that the Mad Men creative team would have done an excellent job of developing the character of Sally Draper to fit whatever sort of young woman Kiernan grew into, they've taken splendid advantage of the treasure they lucked into in the original casting.

The fact is that Kiernan herself has been a really fine actress at all the ages she has passed through these eight years. I remember being really knocked out by the Season 3 episode (No. 4, "The Arrangements") in which Sally gets close to her creepy Grandpa Gene and then deals with his death. The quality of Kiernan's work has enabled the Mad Men team to do with and for her what the best TV writers always do: incorporate the actor into the evolution of the character. In last week's episode the team had the inspiration to bring back Sally's old pal Glen Bishop, and revealed to us that Sally and Glen have been in close contact all this time. (It can't have been a strain for the casting people to locate the actor who played Glen, since he's creator-showrunner Matthew Weiner's son Marten. He sure looked different, though! And no, that thing between Glen and Betty wasn't forgotten either.)

It made for an obvious time for the AMC blog team to do a new interview with Kiernan, and they had the new interview ready to roll right after the episode aired.

Sally now: Kiernan Shipka in last week's episode of Mad Men

Kiernan Shipka, who plays Sally Draper on AMC’s Mad Men, talks about saying goodbye to her on-screen parents and Sally’s reunion with Glen.

Q: You basically grew up onscreen. Do you still remember your first day on set and that scene with Betty’s dry cleaning bag over your head?

A: I do! I remember it very vividly. I’m lucky – I was six when I started – and all my memories early on are very vivid and I’m so glad I have them.

Q: Sally has certainly gotten sassier over the years and lots of fans love her for that! Where does that sass come from?

A: I think the fact that Sally’s sassy is because she’s a very smart girl and I don’t think she likes to put up with a lot. I think that’s where it stems from and I think it’s heightened usually when she’s frustrated with someone or just having fun. She’s witty.

Q: What was it like to reunite with Marten Weiner in Episode 710? What do you make of Sally and Glen’s friendship?

A: It was great. I love working with Marten. He’s the best. I’ve known him for a really long time. It’s crazy [how] we’ve both grown up so much and he’s at real college now, so that [episode] was cool to do because it felt like a lot of time had gone by. Sally and Glen’s friendship throughout the years has always been a really special thing to both of them because they were there for each other. Sally never really had an adult to confide in or lean on and trust. She loves both her parents, but she doesn’t really feel that comfort to talk to them like she could always talk to Glen. This is such an emotional time for her. She was mad at him, but also sad for herself. She was really losing her best friend.

Q: Sally mentions not wanting to be like Don or Betty, but do you see any similarities that she shares with them?

A: I think that Sally is in some ways like her parents, but I think in general, she’s very much her own person. As an individual, I really just see her as Sally and not a reflection of either of her parents.

Q: Speaking of Don and Betty, how did you say goodbye to your on-screen parents?

A: The last day on set was very crazy and sad, for sure. Throughout the day, the cast members were all making their speeches and it was definitely somber. After everything wrapped, we hung out for a little bit and played Catchphrase and all sorts of other games. That was really fun and it did feel, in a way, like a last hurrah.

Q: We went back and reread your interview when we first spoke to you almost six years ago…

A: Oh my god! [Laughs]

Q: [Laughs] You predicted Sally would go to college and have a family, but now she seems pretty unsure about her future and career goals. If you could offer her any advice, what would it be?

A: I have faith in Sally. I would probably just tell her to do her thing because I think she’s pretty great and very smart and really on the right track. She’s going places.

Q: If you weren’t acting, what would you be doing professionally?

A: I always said I would want to be a food critic. I love eating so much and I love writing, so I thought it would be a perfect combination. It would definitely be something artistic.

Q: Are you still planning to have that full Mad Men series viewing marathon when all the episodes are over?

A: I couldn’t wait! I already did it. It was awesome. It’s really nice because the scenes that I was in are very nostalgic and just watching them as a whole is very special. Seeing the whole picture was nice.

Q: Have you gotten to keep anything of Sally’s? What do you treasure the most?

A: I got to keep Sally’s “SBD” necklace. I was very happy I got to keep that because I feel like it’s a very vital part of her character and her style – which is also something that I really love – and it’s also really cute, so I can wear it.

AND SALLY BACK IN THE DAY

Since our friends at AMC provided the link, we took a peek back at Kiernan's Season 2 interview.

Sally then: Here she is back in Season 2.

Over the course of Season 2, Sally Draper grew up and got into trouble. She visited Sterling Cooper, tried smoking, received a pair of riding boots, and even mixed cocktails. AMCtv.com spoke with Kiernan Shipka, the articulate 9-year-old actress who plays the Draper daughter.

Q: Sally Draper has a lot of personality. Do you relate to her personally?

A: I love playing Sally. She is a quintessential girl of the 1960s. People come up to me and say how much they relate to my character. It conjures up a lot
of memories for them.

Q: Did you study the ’60s to learn what it was like?

A: I talk to my mother and get her advice about what she was like as a girl.

Q: What’s it like working with your TV parents, Jon Hamm and January Jones?

A: They are great. We have fun, and then sometimes, we’re very serious.

Q: The costumes you wear as Sally are quite different from what kids wear today. Do you like her clothes?

A: Sally’s wardrobe is so pretty. I get advice from my fittings all the time! Sometimes I wear clothes that are like Sally’s.

Q: Sally also practices ballet. Do you dance?

A: I love dancing. I dance about 20 hours a week. I play piano, too, but it’s not serious yet. It’s mostly playing around.

Q: In Season 2, your character gets to order room service. Have you ordered room service before?

A: I love ordering room service. It’s my favorite thing to do when I stay in a hotel.

Q: What’s your favorite thing to order?

A: I’m pretty hooked on the French onion soup right now.

Q: At the end of Season 2, your character gets her own pair of riding boots. Do you ride horses?

A: I loved the riding boots. They were really beautiful. I ride Western and English. I would like to do it more.

Q: What do you think Sally will be when she grows up?

A: She could grow up in her mom’s footsteps and go to college and have a family, or I think she could be a dance instructor.

Q: What is your favorite thing about being on Mad Men?

A: I love the cast and crew. They are delightful to be around.

Labels: AMC, Mad Men, TV Watch

Matthew W says: "I wanted to be in an environment where we're not part of entertainment wish-fulfillment, because most of us are failing constantly. We're looking for forgiveness. We're looking to make a fresh start. And that tradition of humanity on the show is something I'm very proud of. I don't see a lot of it anywhere else."

by Ken

As I noted last night, at the March 20 live event with Mad Men's creator-overseer at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Matthew Weiner talked about having been overwhelmed the day before, the first time he toured the museum's Mad Men exhibition (for which he had personally provided a great deal of material in addition to encouraging cooperation from the rest of the Mad Men team), seeing seven years of his life on display. By the second day, he reported, he'd begun to take it in more equably.

Without minimizing the importance of the obviously terrific team Matthew W assembled to produce these seven seasons of the show, there's also no question how much of it comes back to him. So as we approach tonight's launch of the final run of episodes, it's a treat to be able to share this Q-and-A from amctv.com's Mad Men blog, "on the end of an era and the legacy of one of television’s most beloved shows."

Q: It’s the end of an era! What does it feel like to be closing out Mad Men?

A: It sounds terrible but you know, right now I’m not feeling sorry for myself. I’m getting to experience the joy of finishing this — the completeness of it, the gratitude for getting to end it how and when we wanted to. I’m really excited. It’s a very positive thing. Ask me when it’s really over, like a year from now, and I’ll be like, “God, I miss Peggy. I wonder how she’s doing. I miss Betty. I wonder what she’s up to. Did she just drive by?” [Laughs]

Q: You’ve written seven seasons of the show. What’s the best advice you’ve gotten?

A: I got a lot of advice during Season 1 from people who are way more experienced and wiser than I am now… I remember someone saying, “Trust your gut. There’s no right way to do it. You’ll find your own way.” And about six months into the first season, I had a lingering, painful stomach ache every day for a week and I realized that it was from me psychologically focusing on my gut. [Laughs]

Q: You set out to portray the ’60s as one of history’s transformative periods…

A: I believe the show has pointed out that we have been going through a change. But we always are… That period between 1960 and 1965 where we really lived for the bulk of the show was largely forgotten. It was seen as the ‘50s, and people in their mind thought it went right from Fonzie to Woodstock, but it’s a much more gradual thing… The space program with all the beautiful ambition to put a man on the moon was really about a weapons program simultaneously. It was the friendly face of the weapons program. Stuff like that, I learned on the show!

Q: What historical moments did you most enjoy portraying?

A: The show is not driven by historic events. It’s driven by what is going on in people’s lives. Don’s getting divorced. Betty is sick of it. Don is alone. Peggy is sick of Don. Joan is going to realize that her expectations for a husband and a family were thwarted in some way and she has to reevaluate. The history stuff is not important.

Q: Speaking of the space program, if you could only send one episode of Mad Men on a mission to colonize another planet, which would it be?

A: I would send more important things than a TV show to populate a new planet. [Laughs]… And the format is really small, why can’t we send the whole series? I think it would be more valuable if we sent the whole thing.

Q: How difficult is it for you to pick favorite episodes or parts of the show?

A: I get asked all the time what’s my favorite this or that. I lived through all of it. It is tracing the history of both of the companies I worked in. It’s tracing the history of what happened in my life, the writer’s lives, in the actor’s lives. The show is told in the third person in this operatic context to some degree, but there’s so many things where I’m just, “That was a real guy, that was something that really happened to somebody.”

Q: What character do you most miss writing for?

A: I had a couple of ideas recently that were completely useless; one of them was for Roger and one of them was for Don. So I don’t know. I had a story thing and then was like, “Oh wait a minute, I’m never going to do that again.” [Laughs]

Q: Mad Men has impacted so much, from fashion to the quality of writing in television. Which aspect of the show’s legacy are you most proud of?

A: I believe that non-formulaic storytelling — storytelling on a human level with whatever genre that this turns out to be — that adventurousness in the writer’s room to take the risks on telling stories, that’s what I hope the legacy of the show is. That’s what I’m proudest of. And also I’m super proud of being part of a group mindset that’s accepting and nonjudgmental of human weakness… I wanted to be in an environment where we’re not part of entertainment wish-fulfillment because most of us are failing constantly. We’re looking for forgiveness. We’re looking to make a fresh start. And that tradition of humanity on the show is something I’m very proud of. I don’t see a lot of it anywhere else.

Q: Has the Mad Men genre gotten any easier to define?

A: It’s still hard. I have people come up who have no problems telling me they’ve either never heard of it or they don’t watch TV, and all I really want to say is, “It’s not what you think it is…” They’re not apologizing for not watching TV. They’re literally saying, “I’m not part of the lower part of humanity that is part of the mass culture.” And I want to say, “Uh, I don’t know if you know this, but if you’re going to the opera tonight, that was the TV of its day.” [Laughs]

The final seven episodes -- officially the "second half of Season 7," the first half of which aired last April-May -- begin tonight at 10pm (9pm CT) on AMC.

Labels: AMC, Mad Men, Matthew Weiner

It's the birth of the "real" Mike! (Foolish as those other guys are made to look, I'll bet the actors were thrilled to be doing a scene with Jonathan Banks.) In this corner, the next-to-last episode of Season 1 of Better Call Saul registered as a "wow!"

by Ken

There's been an inordinate amount of crap to wade through on the TV scene, but also some oases. This includes a number that probably deserve -- and may yet get -- individual attention, but which I didn't want to go uncelebrated.


WASN'T THAT AN AWESOME BETTER CALL SAUL?


"You're not a real lawyer," Chuck McGill says to brother Jimmy. And cruel as it seems, is he wrong? Then again, if he hadn't had Jimmy forced out of the case that he found, who knows?

I'll be interested to go back and rewatch all the episodes, which I've enjoyed thoroughly, but which I suspect will prove even more absorbing now that we've gotten to know the characters so much better. This past week's episode, however, "Pimento," the next-to-last Season 1 episode, struck me as a total "wow!," with the biggest payoff we've gotten to date for our investment in these characters -- notably the four central ones: the brothers McGill, Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) and Chuck (Michael McKean), their lawyer colleague Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn), and of course Jimmy's future right-hand man Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) -- the first instance of Mike being Mike.

How great was it to see Chuck fighting his way through his crippling sensitivity to electricity to actually return to HHM? (And the preparations everyone at the firm made, and the reception they gave him?) But more than anything, for me, there were those two great Jimmy-Chuck scenes -- first, as Chuck breaks the news to Jimmy that the two of them can't handle the potential blockbuster class-action case Jimmy has dug up, that there's no choice but to turn the case over to HHM. Already, I found myself remembering that these are two of the all-time great comic actors -- and remembering because there's nothing at all comical about what these guys are doing here. And then there's the scene excerpted in the above clip, as Jimmy reveals to Chuck that he knows it was Chuck who forced him out of the case. Awesome stuff!


MEANWHILE THE MIDDLE'S HAD A "HECK"-UVA SEASON


Sue has figured out that Axl has to be nice to her. (This is the least blah of the three clips ABC extracted for promotion from an episode that had at least 10 splendidly clip-worthy moments. Does the network have any idea what makes this show so good? Could this have anything to do with why so few people know how good the show is?)

I guess it's just a coincidence that ABC's two enduring quality sitcoms, Modern Family and The Middle, both have a daughter facing the agony of college application-and-acceptance. Of course Alex Dunphy (Ariel Winter) and Sue Heck (Eden Sher) don't have much else in common, but both shows have found fresh and engaging angles on the subject. I loved the plot line in last week's Modern Family of Alex's deep depression over her CalTech acceptance. I assumed she had lied about having been accepted, but the actual answer was way better -- especially since it was her grandfather Jay (Ed O'Neill) who instinctively understood, leading to a rare and really sweet moment between them.

For Sue, well, this whole year has been, finally, the Year of Sue. I think it's been wonderful the way the writers have found for her to finally begin emerging from her hard-luck cloud -- in a way that began to allow her to feel some confidence in herself and to imagine some hopes for her future. And that set up the wonderful moment of the Heck family celebration of the fact that -- they're poor! Finally they get to cash in on their financial misery!

It was also an episode that made great use of some of the show's inventory of recurring characters:

• Dave Foley as Dr. Fulton, Brick's (Atticus Shaffer), er, peculiar psychologist-counselor (who might be thought of as either half-hinged or half-unhinged, depending on your outlook)

• Norm MacDonald as Mike Heck's, er, peculiar brother Rusty, with a scene in which Mike (Neil Flynn) suddenly is forced to revisit their relationship through the eyes of a kid brother who worshipped a big brother who pretty much tormented him their whole lives.

• Gia Mantegna as Devin, the latest of Axl's (Charlie McDermott) way-too-good-for-the-jerk-he-is girlfriends, who made it possible for Sue to get some fake but nevertheless demonstrated loving from her tormenting big brother.

And it was an episode in which Frankie (Patricia) performed one of her trademark cringe-worthy meltdowns. Yes, I cringe; this time I'm pretty sure I said out loud, "Stop!" But of course Frankie can't stop. Only this time, with help from, of all people, Dr. Fulton, she fought her way back, and while her effort at mitigating the damage threatened to become as unbalanced as the original wig-out, she got through it, and even saw some payoff.


AND DON'T FORGET, TOMORROW NIGHT IS
THE BEGINNING OF THE END FOR MAD MEN


Matt Lauer talks to the Mad Men crew on Today.

Naturally the folks at the AMC blog have some suggestions to prepare for this final run of episodes.

10 Ways to Get Ready for the Mad Men Premiere This Sunday
[from amctv.com -- links onsite]

The Final Episodes begin this Sunday at 10/9c — are you ready? Here are 10 ways to prepare for the beginning of the end…

1. Missed any episodes last year? Catch up with the Season 7 marathon on AMC, beginning Sunday at 2:30/1:30c and running until the premiere at 10/9c. You can also watch full episodes on amc.com (cable/satellite provider log-in required).

2. Relive the whole story with The Complete Mad Men Fan Companion. View props, blueprints, sketches, and photography, which include behind-the-scenes quotes and potent moments from all seven seasons.

3. Watch Matthew Weiner’s commentary on ten Fan Favorite Scenes, including the “Lawnmower Incident,” Lane’s fistfight with Pete, and the reunion between Don and Betty.

4. Take in the cast perspective with the Last Round With the Cast videos: Don’s Secret, Pete’s Life Lessons, Roger’s Awakening, Peggy’s Transformation, and Joan’s Ambition.

5. Get the scoop on all of last week’s Mad Men events, with full photo galleries.

6. See what other fans have to say: Watch the full set of Mad Men Tributes as Gary Oldman, Sarah Silverman, David O. Russell, and others reminisce and say goodbye to a favorite show.

7. Count down each and every punch, cigarette, and affair with Mad Men by the Numbers.

8. Check in on Mad Men: The Fan Cut. Watch fan versions of scenes from the very first episode, and share your favorites.

9. Put your knowledge of Mad Men trivia to the test with all the Ultimate Fan Games.

10. Join the Mad Men Social Club for early and exclusive access to photos, videos, interviews, features and more.

A FIRST LOOK AT THE MoMI MAD MEN EXHIBITION
(PLUS: THE WIZARD OF OZ IN GORGEOUS 3-D)


Don's Season 4 office, one of the two Mad Men sets reassembled in the Museum of the Moving Image's Mad Men exhibition, is apparently featured in this AP video accompanying Frazier Moore's rave review. (Maybe you can get it to play.) There's now a line on the museum's Web page for the exhibition which advises: "To avoid lines on weekend days, visitors are encouraged to arrive before 2:00 p.m.")

Today, following a screening at the Museum of the Moving Image (in Astoria, Queens) of Warner Bros.' spanking gorgeous 3-D digital restoration of The Wizard of Oz (there are daily screenings at 12:30pm through April 12; there's also a daily 45-minute "Wizard of Oz Character Remix" every day 12 2:30pm, recommended for ages 5-10), I finally got upstairs for my first look at MoMI's much-heralded Mad Men exhibition, which runs through June 14 and has been really packing crowds in.

At the wonderful sold-out March 20 MoMI event celebrating Mad Men and creator Matthew Weiner, the honoree tried to describe his reaction to seeing the exhibition, for which he and the rest of the Mad Men team had provided abundant cooperation. He had first seen it the day before, he said, and was kind of overwhelmed by seeing seven years of his life on display. (There are, among lots of goodies, a generous assorment of his notes, memos, and scripts.) Seeing it again that day had made it all a lot more manageable, he said.

The crowd today was so abundant that I focused on the things that were viewable without shuffling through the enormous procession, like the two actual rooms reassembled from warehoused sets: the original Draper kitchen and Don's Season 4 office. Not only has each set been lovingly put back together, but for each there's a screen display with an assortment of scenes shot on that set! Beyond that there's just so much that I know I'll have to clear more time to take it all in.


THAT'S RIGHT, MoMI IS SHOWING THE WIZARD
OF OZ IN 3-D DAILY AT 12:30 THROUGH APRIL 12



And it looks fabulous!

Labels: AMC, Better Call Saul, Mad Men, Middle (The), TV Watch

No, you can't click on anything here; it's just a screen grab. If you want to watch the Exclusive New Mad Men Trailer Featuring Alabama Shakes, go here.

by Ken

So I got the an e-mail yesterday. owing to my membership in the highly exclusive Mad Men Social Club (so exclusive that the only way to become a member is by signing up), which contained a tease-and-link for the above clip. No, my blood didn't start racing. Because, keen as I am for the start of this final run of Mad Men episodes (come on, April 5!), I know perfectly well by now -- as we've discussed here so often -- that while Mad Men creator-mastermind Matthew Weiner knows as well as anybody that his product must be promoted, he's not going to let either his own people or the AMC PR corps reveal anything of substance about as-yet-unaired episodes.

(How would you like a PR assignment like that? You've got to try to drive people wild with anticipation without telling them [us] anything that they [we] don't already know.)

I respect the hell out of Matt W and any other responsible parties for this. There are movie and TV promoters who don't give a damn, and we wind up watching the first hour of the movie or the first episode or two of the TV series seeing all sorts of stuff we've already sort-of-seen. No sir, I want my slate for the episodes-to-come to be as clean as humanly possible when they finally come. (Come on, April 5!) Even if right now this is making me just the least bit crazy. Even more so since, as I reported, I zipped through the seven episodes that constituted "the first half of Season 7," as we're committed to calling the episodes that aired between April 13 and May 25, 2014, which sure sounds like "last season" to me. This is one helluva mid-season lull we've been enduring, waiting for the seven episodes that will constitute "the second half of Season 7." (In the event that April 5 ever comes.)

I've seen enough of these phony-baloney trailers to know that they're not going to tell me anything useful. And of course my official position is that I don't want to know anything about what's going to happen until it, you know, happens. It would be different if somebody were to slip me some secret link and maybe accompanying secret code so I could start watching those final episodes, but that's not going to happen. (Is it?)

Which doesn't mean that I didn't watch the damned "exclusive look" trailer. And, as I expected, I didn't see anything that told me anything about anything.

It was only after watching the clip, though, that I looked a little closer at how it was presented on-screen (see above) and then flashed back to how it had been teased in the AMC Mad Men Social Club, like so:



Do you notice anything different?

The e-mail tease was for a "New Trailer Featuring the Alabama Shakes." I didn't linger over it because I knew perfectly well that I had no clue what, or maybe who, "the Albama Shakes" is, or are -- an object or objects, a person or persons, or maybe a debilitating physical condition? I wasn't any the wiser, Alabama Shakes-wise, after watching the clip. But I did notice that here what I was being offered was a "New Trailer Featuring Alabama Shakes," which isn't quite the same thing. At this point I just went to Wikipedia and learned that, as I was coming to suspect, Alabama Shakes is a musical group. They could still be known, of course, as "the Alabama Shakes," just like the Rolling Stones are known as, well, the Rolling Stones, but I gather from glancing through the Wikipeda entry that this isn't the case. I don't rule out the possibility that the person who wrote the copy for the e-mail isn't a lot clearer about who or what the Alabama Shakes is/are than I am.

What we have here is what we might call "a frame-of-reference" issue, and a pretty crude one at that. The promoters of this promotion assume that the promotees will know who or what (the) Alabama Shakes is/are. I describe it as a pretty crude example of a problem with "frames of reference" because pretty obviously the promoters don't care whether I know who or what (the) Alabama Shakes is/are. I am, you might say, safely outside their frame of reference. Fortunately, this isn't exactly the first time I've found myself in this position. I am, by now, pretty well used to it. I'm often more surprised when I'm included "in the frame" of a current pop-cultural reference.


JUST AS OFTEN, I'M ON THE INSIDE OF A
"FRAME OF REFERENCE" LOOKING OUT

Perfect example: Barring unforeseen developments, like maybe getting hit by a bus or maybe the world coming to an end (hey, these things happen!), tomorrow I'm going to be writing a little about North by Northwest. Ohmygosh, do I love North by Northwest, and tomorrow I'm all booked for a real, live big-screen screening of it at the Museum of the Moving Image, the first of the movies chosen by the aforementioned Matthew Weiner for the MoMI film series, "Required Viewing: Mad Men's Movie Influences," being shown alongside the museum's Mad Men exhibition, which opens today and runs through June 14. (I had to skip the "members' preview" of the exhibition last night in order to finish a post, but I should arrive early enough tomorrow, even traveling from my NY Transit Museum tour of the Mother Clara Hale Bus Depot in Harlem, to have a first look through the exhibition before the screening.

Am I psyched for this, or what?

The only thing is, I'm realizing before I even set down any actual words for the blogpost I'm imagining, that I have a whopper of a "frame of reference" problem. North by Northwest came out in 1959. In its time it was, I think, an extremely well-known movie. (Yes, it's a movie, in case you didn't know.) As you would expect, considering that it surely has to rank on any serious list of the Greatest Movies Ever Made. I'm not saying flat out that it is the Greatest Movie Ever Made, though I'm not saying it isn't. I'm just saying that, if you were to try to compile such a list, how it, not only do I not see how it could be left off the list, I don't see by what criteria it could be kicked off as you tried to whittle the list down.

And yet, as I was reminded some months back when I was preparing to take the plunge and was shopping for a Blu-ray edition of the film, and looking at Amazon comments for guidance as to the quality of the versions possibly on offer, a whole hell of a lot of people have, or at least had, never heard of the picture. Quite possibly a lot of people who consider themselves conversant with movies generally, would guess that a film as ancient as this must be in black-and-white -- well, heck, the film Alfred Hitchcock made immediately after North by Northwest, which is to say Psycho, is in black-and-white. And many of those same people might guess that a film of this antiquity may not even have talking. Assuming. of course, that they're aware that there were once such things as "silent" movies.

And wait -- even as I typed the name of Alfred Hitchcock, I was painfully aware that there are a lot of people today who have no idea who Alfred Hitchcock is, or was. No, is, because there seems to me no chance that he will ever be dislodged from the list of the greatest of all movie directors.

Then there are a couple of names that were once as famous as any that have been bandied about in Hollywood -- Hitch's two most frequent leading men, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart. It was Cary Grant who was cast to play North by Northwest's Roger Thornhill, and his performance is not only the crowning glory in one of Hollywood's most storied careers but a performance of a kind I can't imagine any other actor, past or present, being able to give. I had never known, however, until I was diving into the zillion or so hours of special features that came on the Blu-ray, that as the script was in development, Jimmy Stewart wanted ever so badly to play the role. And while his Roger Thornhill wouldn't have been anything like Cary Grant's, I'll bet he would have been fantastic too.

Now, as I approach writing this piece, I'm inclined to guess that with the DWT audience, I'm probably going to be okay with Hitch, Cary, and Jimmy. How about, say, James Mason and Martin Landau, though? How do you talk about the astonishing achievement of North by Northwest without hailing their stunning performances, making such dazzling use of every second of the limited screen time they have, and making their characters' curious relationship if anything more interesting, if less shocking, in 2015 than it was in 1959?


I put this shot of Cary Grant as Roger Thornhill in Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest atop my earlier post about the Museum of the Moving Image's grand celebration of Mad Men, including the Matthew Weiner-selected film series "Required Viewing: Mad Men's Movie Influences." Now I have to wonder, how many readers today will know who Cary Grant and Alfred Hitchcock are?


SAY, JUST WHERE IS ALL THIS "FRAME
OF REFERENCE" STUFF COMING FROM?

Very good question! No, it didn't just come to me spontaneously. It was entirely prompted by the latest piece, in the March 9 New Yorker, in John McPhee's ongoing series of "Writer's Life" pieces reflecting on his occupation as a writer: "Frame of Reference: To illuminate -- or to irritate?"

It's not as if I was unaware of the issue, or didn't have it at least in the back of my head with everything I write or edit. What I have to say I wasn't crediting fully enough is just how pervasive the issue can be for anyone who tries to communicate with fellow humans in any medium. John really had me reeling! And so I'd like to talk a little more about his piece in my 7pm PT/10pm ET post.

Labels: AMC, Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, New Yorker (The)

Labels: AMC, Mad Men

Labels: AMC, Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, TV Watch

Bob Odenkirk talks to Jimmy Kimmel about Better
Call Saul, and shows him some, er, surprising clips


Jimmy tells Bob he's really enjoyed the two episodes he was given to watch. Bob tells Jimmy he's only seen one -- but hopes the second one turned out well. "I spent 14 hours on my knees in the desert for that second one."

by Ken

Okay, friends, it's finally here: the two-night premiere of AMC's Breaking Bad spinoff Better Call Saul, created and overseen by Breaking Bad mastermind Vince Gilligan and collaborator Peter Gould -- tomorrow and Monday nights at 10pm (or possibly some other time where you are -- you know about checking your local listings, right?). Then, as a commenter noted her previously, the show settles into the Monday-night time slot. (That's a great relief for me. Sunday is the one night of the week I can barely manage, even with the DVR at full throttle.)

In a more "normal" clip, the creative team and cast
introduce us to "The Characters of Better Call Saul"



BUT LET ME ALSO PUT IN A GOOD WORD FOR PBS
MASTERPIECE MYSTERY'S GRANTCHESTER


In Episode 1, the vicar of backwater Grantchester, Sidney Chambers (James Norton), has his seemingly inauspicious but in fact fateful first meeting with local police Inspector Geordie Keating.

It sounds like a scraping of the bottom of the British-mystery-possibilities barrel: In 1953, the vicar in an English backwater, who suffers nightmarish wartime flashbacks, teams up with the local police inspector to -- yes! -- solve crimes. (It's based on a series of Grantchester Mysteries by James Runcie.) And yet, three episodes in, out of a first series of six (Episode 4 airs tomorrow night on most PBS stations, but again, check your local listings), I'm not only enjoying it but looking forward to more.

Certainly an important part of that appeal is the interestingly delineated pair of central characters.


James Norton and Robson Green talk about the show.

Sidney, for starters, isn't just any vicar. Oh, he's totally serious about his job, but it's not lost on anyone, least of all himself, that he's a heartthrob-quality hunk with unconventional interests, at least for a vicar, including a soul-mate-type relationship with ravishing young Amanda (Morven Christie), the upper-crust daughter of a "sir" of some sort, a schoolmate of Sidney's scholarship-student sister Jenny (Fiona Button).

Although Sidney's relationship with Amanda showed signs in Episode 1 of significant degress of inappropriateness, there is of course nothing inherently inappropriate about an Anglican priest enjoying the company of women. In fact, a lot of Sidney's parishioners, not to mention the vicarage housekeeper Mrs. Maguire (Tessa Peake-Jones), seem concerned that he still isn't married, as a proper vicar ought to be. What's never stated, and took a slow-on-the-uptake viewer like myself a couple of episodes to puzzle out, is that a match between them is unthinkable on grounds of class incompatibility.

Despite Sidney's history of hobnobbing with his social betters -- it's not hard to see why he was so popular among Jenny's heavy-breathing schoolmates -- and his status as vicar allows him to fraternize, up to a point, as we see in this clip from Episode 2, he's treated by Amanda's father, Sir Edward Kendall (Pip Torrens), with a combination of long-time acquaintance and a condescension that borders on contempt. (It won't be long before we see Sir Edward's condescension cross theborder.) In the clip we see Sidney suffering through an engagement party for, yes, Amanda! The guests include his sister Jenny (the blonde) and her escort, Johnny Johnson (Uweli Roach), and insufferable other school friends.



Inspector Geordie, meanwhile, is thoroughly, defiantly, chip-on-his-shoulder working-class, and it's quite charming to see Robson Green in a role that makes no claim to stylishness or glamor. And I think he's quite terrific here. Geordie is as dedicated to his job as Sidney is to his, and once Geordie begins to discover that the vicar is almost as much an outsider relative to the area swells as he is, he mellows enough to allow for the possibility of a friendship. That friendship is handled much the way of one of the all-time great screen friendships, that of Mary Richards and Rhoda Morgenstern: By the end of Episode 1, the possibility of a thaw was established, and by Episode 2 they were best friends.

The friendship between Sidney and Geordie is as intriguing and appealing as it is improbable. Now we just have to hope that the creative team continues to find crimes that can plausibly be solved by the copper-and-priest crime-fighting duo.

It should still be possible to catch up with the earlier episodes online or "On Demand." The PBS Masterpiece website has Episode 1 (through February 15), Episode 2, and Episode 3. If you miss Episode 4, I expect you can find it in turn in the same places.

Labels: AMC, Better Call Saul, Masterpiece Classic, PBS, TV Watch

"Money is not 'beside the point.' Money is the point."

by Ken

Thanks for clarifying that, Saul . . . er, Jimmy. Note that as we edge closer to the two-night premiere of Better Call Saul, February 8 and 9, AMC has released this "extended trailer."

Which still leaves the matter of a second possible Breaking Bad prequel that has been discussed, The Rise of Gus. While rummaging around online, I found this interview with Giancarlo Esposito which was posted in May 2014. You've probably seen it, but I hadn't.



Amid the enormous gallery of memorable characters created by the Breaking Bad team, two always stood out for me as just plain riveting -- Saul Goodman, of course, but also the chicken magnate who happened also to be a big-time vicious drug lord, Gus Fring. In this interview Giancarlo has lots of fascinating things to say about the way he fleshed out a character who was originally written as a waiter appearing in one or maybe two episodes. By the time he got off the plane after finishing that first episode, he tells us in the interview, his phone was ringing asking him back. He also talks fascinatingly here about the experience of working with Bryan Cranston.

Giancarlo tells us that a phrase he was given by BB mastermind Vince Gilligan triggered his imagination in creating Gus: "hiding in plain sight." From that germ he imagined the character who was so meticulous and methodical and also personally gracious -- "someone we all might know" who is at the same time "doing something quite different from what we might expect."

In particular, Giancarlo talks about his hope that we may yet see a Rise of Gus spinoff from BB. Apparently Vince G and his people talked to the AMC people about spinning off either Gus or everybody's favorite shyster, Saul Goodman, and the Saul project, being more fully developed in the creative team's minds and also promising to be fun to do, won out.

As of the time of the interview, Giancarlo said he'd been asked to make an appearance on Better Call Saul, but said he was inclined to pass, to leave the Gus we know fully created, unless he could do several episodes which would allow us to see more of who Gus was. I have no more recent information, so I have no idea how those conversations turned out, but Giancarlo is awfully persuasive in suggesting that the way should be wide upon for showing us The Rise of Gus.

One thing we certainly saw in BB, thanks to Giancarlo's incredibly meticulous portrayal, was Gus's almost compulsive attention to detail just as a businessman, in the no-detail-too-small-to-obsess-over, service-driven way he ran Los Pollos Hermanos, his chicken restaurant. Back in the day, before I had Gus's name lodged in memory, in chatting with our Noah and about BB, I always referred to this guy, who after all was a big-time drug lord, as "The Chicken Guy." And while it's true that, as Giancarlo says, Gus was always hiding something, he also thinks there's more to his personality as "a citizen of our society," with a deep sense of responsibility that was shown in the elaborate lifetime-care plan he arranged for his chemist.

(I think my next two nominees for BB Hall of Fame-dom would be Jonathan Banks's Mike, Saul's one-man clean-up and enforcement squad, and David Costabile's Gale, Walter White's spectacularly competent meth-cooking assistant -- who, come to think of it, in the end, long after his own demise, is responsible for Walter's.)

Giancarlo would also like us to see Gus's prehistory in Chile, and what happened to twist this scion of a prominent family, whom he imagines as a "rogue son" in the manner of Osama bin Laden. He makes clear that he's happy for everyone involved in what became Better Call Saul, but he thinks there's still room for, say, a 13-episode Rise of Gus.

I find references fromJune and July in which Giancarlo continued to talk up the Rise of Gus idea, but I have no more recent information. So how 'bout it, Vince and AMC?

Labels: AMC, Better Call Saul, Breaking Bad, TV Watch

AMC sez, "Party Like It's 1969": This is no ordinary New Year's libation. It's the Mad Men Champagne Cocktail.

by Ken

From the folks at Mad Men Social Club (links onsite):

The Mad Men Cocktail Guide: Party Like It's 1969!

Want to make this evening's New Year's Eve bash a memorable one? Ditch the pedestrian champagne flutes and mix things up with the Mad Men Cocktail Guide. From Gimlets to Greyhounds, Mai Tais to Manhattans, you'll find inspiration, ingredients, and instructions that'll have you ready for a midnight toast to remember all year long. So when it's time to belt out "Auld Lang Syne," raise your Sidecar, your Old Fashioned, your French 75 . . . and welcome 2015 in style.

Meanwhile, AMC continues Sunday-morning Mad Men encores, this weekend finishing up Season 2 and dipping into Season 3, meaning we're introduced to Lane (links onsite).

What can Maddicts expect? Roger proposes to Jane (Season 2, Episode 11, “The Jet Set”); Peggy requests Freddie‘s old office (Season 2, Episode 12, “The Mountain King”); Betty breaks the news to Don that she’s pregnant (Season 2, Episode 13, “Meditations in an Emergency”); and Lane Pryce is introduced (Season 3, Episode 1, “Out of Town”). . . .

Mad Men encores air Sundays at 6AM/5c.


Anyone wanna bet on how Roger and Jane's marriage works out?

FIVE WISHES FOR THE NEW YEAR



1. World peace, and decent living conditions for all -- oh yes, and good health to all.
2. Season 5 of Downton Abbey doesn't suck. (I just finished rewatching Season 4, which I hadn't enjoyed all that much, and was delighted to find that it's quite sensational, with almost every character involved in powerful basic-life-needs plots.)
3. Pepperidge Farm makes it possible to buy yummy Lido cookies separately again. (Not those yucky coconutty Tahiti thingies.)
4. I mentioned about world peace and decent living conditions and good health for all, didn't I?
5. I mentioned about the Lido cookies, didn't I?

That's not asking for an awful lot, is it?

Happy New Year, everyone, and thanks for reading. If persistent reports are accurate, once this year is in the can, there's another one ready to be rolled out which is likely to be pretty much the same. Oh well.

Labels: AMC, Mad Men, New Year's