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

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

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

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

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

Beverly Hills, Calif.—After four long and busy days here in Beverly Hills, cable’s portion of the Television Critics Association is wrapping up. The event had its moments, to be sure.

I admit that my eyes welled up when I saw the clip from WE tv’s The Locator, which is about a man who helps adopted people track down their blood relations. In the video, we were shown weepy men and women reconnected to their never-known or long-lost families. It was heart-wrenching.

And I was moved when I saw Georgia, one of Michael Vick’s abused—and toothless—pit bulls that’s been rehabilitated, a process that’s being depicted in Nation...Read More

TV writers—yours truly included—return to the Left Coast this week for the first Television Critics Association tour in a year where cable will kick off an event that normally takes place twice annually, in the winter and summer.

The Writers Guild of America strike earlier this year not only hit Hollywood in the wallet, it put the kibosh on the January press tour, which had to be canceled. Now, the Screen Actors Guild is in the middle of a bitter battle for a new contract. But even with that threat hanging over Hollywood the summer press tour is forging forward.

The “tour” is when TV networks tell the media—gathered scribes from papers across the nation—about their new shows, for the summer, fall and beyond. Network executives, producers...Read More

Note to Google guys: Do your homework before addressing an auditorium that’s packed with advertising-research executives.

There were several cringe-worthy moments at the Advertising Research Foundation’s conference when Google was questioned about two of its media-buying initiatives, namely Google TV Ads and Google Ad Planner.

Both Keval Desai, Google’s director of product management for TV Ads, and Wayne Lin, Google’s business product manager, seemed flummoxed this week when they were asked if the Internet giant would seek accreditation for its two media-buying offerings.

At the conference, Desai and Lin didn&rs...Read More

Oprah Winfrey and Discovery Communications are lining up the management team for the daytime diva’s new cable network, which will debut in the second half of next year—a reincarnation of Discovery Health Channel.

The first shoe dropped yesterday, with the announcement that Robin Schwartz, president of Regency Television, had been appointed president of OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network. It’s a curious choice in my mind, in that Schwartz’s overall experience in cable—at least in what we were told in her announcement—seems somewhat limited.

It’s true, she did a stint at ABC Family. But her strong suit...Read More

I spent Tuesday morning literally in the heart of Times Square, on the island between Broadway and Seventh Avenue, alongside a 10-foot tall slice of wedding cake, decorated with more than 50 gallons of butter cream frosting.

In a stunt celebrating the fifth season of Bridezillas, WE had 10 brides-to-be—clad in wedding dresses, white helmets, and sneakers—scamper up the giant slice, in the middle of the morning rush. In the competition, the first woman to grab a bouquet at the top of the “cake” got a $25,000 check to go toward her coming nuptials.

The winner, Meghan Gressler of Basking Ridge, N.J., shot up the slanted slice so quick she left everyone else in her wake, wiping blue frosting from th...Read More

I should have been a lawyer, working for Charlie Ergen and billing by the hour. I’d never have to worry about my credit cards bills or retirement fund again.

Ergen, who chairs both Dish Network and his equipment company EchoStar, is known for his penchant for suing—and for being sued. I’m not exaggerating when I say I can’t keep up with all the litigation his companies are embroiled in.

But one of his most newsworthy—and sexy—suits came to its culmination Thursday, a piracy case filed in 2003 by EchoStar against one of Rupert Murdoch’s companies, NDS Group.

EchoStar won the case in princi...Read More

Comcast CEO Brian Roberts must be proud.

One of his networks, G4, appears poised to reach a new low in term of taste in programming with its new summer series, Hurl!  The show’s very concept—inspired by viral videos—makes me want to hurl, i.e., throw up. But then I’m out of the network’s demo, which is young men, so what I think doesn’t matter.

Here’s Hurl!’s premise, as explained verbatim in a press release today.

“In each episode of the half-hour series, five contestants will attempt to consume the largest quantity of food in a short amount of time. They will then immediately be subjected to a series of challenges designed to shake them up. The one to hold his or her food down the longe...Read More