Around the Horn -- Off-Season Mad Men Stuff From NYC and Beyond

So, did you click on this link somewhere on the web today and do a double take? That pic of Don Draper and Liz Lemon (Liz Lemon? Yes, Liz Lemon!) is just an illustration, but they do have details in that Vanity Fair story we discussed yesterday on Tina Fey about what Jon Hamm will be doing on 30 Rock in the near future.

(Notice my discipline in not glomming that image from them and posting it here. I'm a responsible blogger, well, I am right now, anyway. Catch me on a day there's a copyright protected clip of Katie Couric mounting an antelope to really test my mettle.)

They say:

When Fey and her clever band of writers conjure up Liz Lemon, her 21st-century Mary Tyler Moore New York career girl, they put in a lot of Rhoda-like neuroses and insecurity about looks and food jokes and epically bad dates—though this season she’s upgraded to Mad Men’s sexy Jon Hamm, who plays a pediatrician who impresses Lemon with his love of pie-making documentaries and ice-cream makers.

Pie making isn't doing really well on TV these days, though. But ice cream is always a crowd favorite.

Next up, we go to the source, Basket of Kisses, the Lipp sisters' blog about the show, where they get actual interviews with people on the show. I would do that, but you actually have to talk to people to interview them, and I'd rather just look at 'em on the teevee.

Roberta has her interview with Elisabeth Moss up (after days of transcription, you should thank her) and she includes this tasty nugget, details on how she ended up on that Mad Men sketch on Saturday Night Live:

So I got a text from her saying Amy just went into labor, can you come tonight, and I called her and I said absolutely. I went over in between my performances, and rehearsed a couple of times. They wrote a new joke for me because now it was like a guest appearing. So Seth Meyers wrote me a great joke. It was crazy. I wasn’t even nervous because I was like in shock. And then the great thing was that, during rehearsal, the SNL cast members kept looking around and being like, This is so cool, it’s like stepping into your favorite tv show. Because they’ve got the set and there are both of the Johns [Hamm and Slattery] and I was there. And I would just look back and be like, Are you kidding me? I’m on SNL! What are you talking about?!

So cool! Go now to Basket of Kisses and read the whole thing. Not just the whole interview, the whole blog, everything Deb and Roberta have written. NOW!!!

Are you back? You read fast! Finally, Adam Sternbergh at New York Magazine is having withdrawal symptoms:

I’m suffering from Quality Show Fatigue.

It’s not Mad Men’s fault. I recognize that it earned a Sopranosesque sixteen Emmy nominations this year. I accept that everyone around me, like brain-hungry zombies, now seems to have only three objectives in life: (1) eat; (2) watch Mad Men; (3) persuade me to watch Mad Men. I’m also aware that, while it feels like about 2 million people have tried to convert me to this show, there are, ironically, only about 2 million people watching the show each week—or roughly 11 million fewer people than watch House, a show that no one has ever tried to force me to embrace.

Yet this relentless Mad Men campaign has done little to sway me. If anything, it’s the reason I’ve held out for so long. Because I can’t help wondering: As viewers, we’re more atomized than ever, with more options, more channels, and less inclination to hunker down en masse. For a lot of us, our TV-watching habits don’t even involve actual TVs. So why do we still feel this manic need to all coalesce around a single show?

Why Adam? I'll tell you why, but I'll have to tell you after the clip which is after the jump. The clip? Just for fun (and because Elisabeth mentioned it) I have the SNL Mad Men sketch posted from Hulu.

LINK

The answer to Adam's question, "Why do we still feel this manic need to all coalesce around a single show?" is community. We don't know our neighbors, we hardly know our families, we have to talk about something to other people, so we talk about the people on the teevee, often like they were real people.

I do it all the time. So do you. And apparently so does Adam. But you gotta know the same neighbors, and if those neighbors happen to appear in the box in your living room instead on the box next to the box you live in, so be it.