Mad Men Season 4

I don't understand what the big deal is with the time. Let it run over. Is AMC worried that Mad Men will cut into some second-rate movie that they've already cut to shreds?

 

They want to sell 2 more minutes of ads. (Irony!) And since high end advertisers covet the demo that watches MM, those are a lucrative two minutes.

I wish HBO had been smart enough to buy this show when Weiner showed them the pilot. Of the 10 best Sopranos episodes, I bet you Weiner wrote four of them. (Kennedy and Heidi; Unidentified Black Males; Sopranos Home Movies; The Blue Comet). You'd think that would clue them into the fact that the dude knew his shit.

 

DanO, I think television types make more of time slotting than most of us would think they should. They believe viewers get very irritated when one show goes two minutes into another hourly slot.

 

If you record shows on TiVo -- which is increasingly how people watch TV these days -- it's infuriating to lose the last two mins of a show because it ran into the next hour and the TiVo was switching to record something else. Many TiVos can correct for it, but not all of them.

 

Yeah, I always set my DVR three minutes early and three minutes late for this reason. Back when I used to watch MTV's Real World/Road Rules Challenge, it was notorious for starting a minute early or a minute late.

 

TiVo doesn't allow for taping two things at once? My DVR does.

 

If I read the AV Club correctly, the episode run will be 91 total.

But, as I recall, for syndication purposes, a show really needed to have about 100 episodes for it to make real money. So something doesn't seem right.

On the other hand, I'm super pumped to hear that the show is getting three more seasons.

Fringe is going to season 4, Archer has been renewed for season 3 and now Mad Men. Things do happen in threes and all my favorite shows are coming back.

 

I just don't see Mad Men of having much life in syndication. Like Lost, it is one of those things that really needs to be seen in sequence to make any sense out of.

 

Are DVD sales more important than syndication?

No clue, just asking.

 

I think it depends on the show. For a half hour sitcom -- like Everybody Loves Raymond -- syndication is much more important since it is a perfect fit to watch out of order. Once you know who the characters are, it doesn't matter if you are watching an episode from season 3 or season 5. The same applies to procedural dramas -- Law and Order, CSI, NCIS, Lie to Me. Syndication is built around shows that don't need to be watched sequentially.

But Mad Men is a show that you want to watch on DVD. It's richly detailed and if you didn't watch the previous 3 episodes, then the one you are watching won't make any sense. So OnDemand and DVD viewings will drive the money train once it goes off the air.

 

Isn't the 100-episode rule for syndication now obsolete?

Seems to me that many shows now sign special deals to run re-runs well before they reach 100.