Mad Males might be probably the greatest 10 tv reveals ever made. It’s definitely some of the vital. It got here to outline a late aughts “golden age” of TV when the web was stuffed with show recaps and essays and aspiring networks had been racing to land status TV hits that will win awards and persuade critics that motion pictures had been not a very powerful medium for visible storytelling. So it’s equally becoming, in a means, that the 4K re-release of Mad Males on HBO consists of sloppy oversights that make it emblematic of media’s current enshitification within the streaming period.
The ultra-HD makeover of AMC’s interval drama about an promoting company straddling the cultural revolution of the ’60s turned obtainable on HBO Max on December 1, and it consists of some distinctive inventive selections. Essentially the most viral of these is leaving within the barf machine for one of many sequence’ most memorable moments. In season 1, episode 7, “Red in the Face,” Don Draper suckers his boss, Roger Sterling, right into a late lunch break full of booze and oysters after which races him up the Manhattan high-rise stairs when the elevator goes out of fee.
Sterling will get again to the workplace simply in time to puke in entrance of the complete company, together with vital purchasers. It’s an vital second that underlines a bunch of conflicting fault traces inside their relationship. It’s additionally very gross. Within the new 4K model, viewers are handled to the precise puke machine that hurls clam chowder out of a pipe subsequent to Sterling’s face, in addition to the stagehands deploying it. It’s fantastically absurd and likewise type of undercuts the complete scene.
the brand new 4K switch of mad males on HBO someway doesn’t have any of the post-production edits added in, which suggests you get stuff like this the place you possibly can see the crew member manning the puke machine after Roger has too many oysters lmao pic.twitter.com/HNgPRNOsla
— johnny (@bigrackspart7) December 2, 2025
“This is hilarious, and the extra hand on the crew member’s shoulder is killing me,” wrote one commenter on Reddit. “Like someone else is giving him extra emotional support while he shoots fake vomit from a tube.” We’ve seen this type of factor occur earlier than, nevertheless it’s often when older shows get updated to newer aspect ratios and stuff that wasn’t initially supposed to be a part of the scene makes it into the body.
The truth that the equipment and its handlers weren’t scrubbed out in post-production, as they had been for the unique model of the present, raises greater questions on simply how rigorously HBO dealt with the re-release of considered one of fashionable TV’s most storied sequence. What sort of penny-pinching apathy lets the barf machine skate by the evaluation course of unscathed, and within the first season no much less?
I casually began re-watching Mad Males whereas doing different stuff simply a few weeks in the past and made it by the primary two seasons very quickly. Who at Warner Bros. Discovery thought it was a good suggestion to convey Mad Males again to a significant streaming platform for the primary time because it left Netflix again in 2020, and never skim it for points? Particularly because it was being upscaled to 4K? In the event that they didn’t even catch the barf machine, what else did they miss?
Effectively, the episode order for one. A minimum of some customers, together with myself, tried to look at season 1, episode 7, solely to search out that it had swapped locations with episode 6, which had swapped locations with episode 5. I suppose David Zaslav didn’t wish to pay somebody’s nephew to sit down in a room and do a last view check earlier than releasing the 4K reduce. Too busy fascinated about Scrooge McDucking his means by mountains of money if Netflix and Skydance get into a bidding war over Warner Bros.
