Fans were promised a step-up in quality, but that's not what they got. Digitally remastered episodes of Mad Men debuted on HBO Max on Monday, and viewers quickly noticed that all was not as it should be. The streaming service said the 4K offering would mean "crisp detail and enhanced visual clarity" for fans, instead they zeroed in on "basic production errors that somehow slipped into the final product," as NBC News reports.
Among the most egregious: In a memorable scene from Season 1, Roger Sterling (played by John Slattery) vomits up oysters in the office; in the remastered episode, crew members operating a device to produce the vomit were visible (see a screenshot here). Another error was sighted in Season 2, when Peggy (played by Elisabeth Moss) is shown walking down what is supposed to be a 1960s New York City street—except a Mexican restaurant with its Los Angeles phone number is visible, as is an ad for cellphone SIM cards. There were also episodes labeled with incorrect titles.
The goofs led to headlines like HBO Max's Mad Men 4K release is the opposite of a remaster and The Mad Men Rollout on HBO Max Might Make Fans Vomit. The mishaps are said to be the result of the wrong files being delivered to HBO Max from Lionsgate Television, which originally ran the series on AMC. Producers are reportedly working to replace them with the correct versions of the show. Writing for Wired, Alan Sepinwall makes the case that none of this was necessary:
- "Mad Men is one of the best-looking TV series ever made. My Blu-ray episodes are gorgeous. On my 4K TV, the HBO Max version of the first episode is a bit crisper and more detailed, but not so much as to justify either the fuss or the circumstances that allowed this flub to happen.
There's so much of a push today to make things look as good as they possibly can, without much thought given to preserving the spirit and style of how they were originally made."
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