Lots and lots of news, so I’m posting before the holiday weekend eats all our brains.

I just found this great interview with Christina Hendricks from June 28. My favorite part is that she doesn’t realize that Joan speaks in a higher voice than she does in real life. How funny!

The New York Post has a cloyingly written, but highly favorable, review of the first couple of episodes of season 2 (hat tip to Basketeer dansj).

When we return (or by the second episode, at any rate), it’s March 1, 1962, the day that John Glenn got a ticker tape parade in lower Manhattan and an American Airlines plane with 70 people aboard crashed after takeoff into Jamaica Bay…

(So my fervent prayer is that they work in one of the singularly worst advertising campaigns of all time – a 1960s airline commercial with singing wives begging, “Take Me Along If You Love Me.” Legend has it that many husbands took the opportunity to get free tickets for their mistresses and secretaries instead. Tragically, the airline then wrote thank you notes to the wives for being taken along… )

Without giving anything away, we also learn that the dreadful Peter wasn’t thrown into the street for trying to blackmail Don and we learn what happened to Peggy’s pregnancy …

Jossip has a funny post up called When Will the Mad Men Backlash Commence?

Critics, too, loved Lost; then they spent a year beating the crap out of its writers before finally coming around again. Rinse and repeat for Desperate Housewives and Grey’s Anatomy and Prison Break.

No backlash from Newsweek, which calls Mad Men “must-see TV.”

More high-profile DVD reviews come from The Washington Post, which understands the series, and uses the word “wanton” (which is one of my favorite words), and from Variety, which calls Mad Men an “unguilty pleasure.”

Brandweek gives us more details of some innovating advertising. I particularly like…

TV ads will make up the bulk of the marketing for Mad Men, AMC’s first original show, with a mix of network and cable buys. A 30-second spot also will run in Landmark Theaters, which cater to art house devotees who’ve been the Mad Men early adopters.

There will be some high-profile stunts and outdoor ads that look to spur water cooler chatter. The shuttles between Grand Central Station and Times Square in New York will become Mad Men set pieces, with the interiors decorated to evoke Draper’s early 1960s world of men in fedoras and martinis with lunch. The cars will have “chandeliers” on the ceilings, snappy lines of dialogue on the walls and life-size images of Draper himself appearing on the commute.

People in period costumes (think: lots of pencil skirts) will roam around Grand Central Station vogueing with cigarettes and handing out cards that say Sterling Cooper, the fictional ad agency on the show.

MetroLife, a British site, gives a short, favorable (or favourable) review to the DVD set, but UK Basketcase Helen tells us that the R2 DVDs are skimpy compared to the US version.

Television (and Mad Men) blogger Alan Sepinwall has a cut-above-the-rest DVD review in the New Jersey Star Ledger. This is one of the few reviews that goes past being excited and thrilled, and digs into exactly what works and doesn’t work about the commentaries, extras, and packaging.

And after a while, all the talk of the show’s brilliance almost gets in the way of the actual brilliance, as if Weiner and company are giving you the hard sell for a product that doesn’t really need it. Weiner’s mentor, “Sopranos” creator David Chase, always hated doing DVD commentaries, or in any way attempting to explain what was there on the screen for people to interpret. While that approach could be frustrating for the most hard-core “Sopranos” fans who might have occasionally liked a clarification, there’s so much information and praise overload on the “Mad Men” set that I began to understand Chase’s less-is-more approach.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette also points out that the tie-in commercials and the original “Making of” features from AMC would have been nice extras to include.

Vue Weekly gives us, in the guise of a DVD review, a thoughtful look at the women of Mad Men, and the way that the show distinguishes itself from boy’s clubs like The Sopranos and The Wire (don’t shoot me—I’ve never seen either one, I’m just quoting the article) by having a strong female focus.

A gossip piece in Forbes is smarmy and strange, but is interesting about the “real mad men”—George Lois, Della Feminia, et al.

Here’s an interview with Elisabeth Moss in IF Magazine on her Fear Itself role (it airs tonight at 10 on NBC). They promise Part Two will be about Mad Men.

…or something. A nominee to the nominees. Top 11 (11?) semi-finalists for best supporting drama actress.

Tom O’Neil of the LA Times ‘the Envelope’ has plenty to say about this list. Of interest to us:

Another surprising omission: January Jones, who portrays Jon Hamm’s emotionally plagued wife on “Mad Men.” Her role is so prominent that many Emmy observers were surprised she opted to compete in the supporting race, not lead like costar Elizabeth Moss. Instead, voters (academy membership is overwhelmingly male) chose to snuggle up to costar Christina Hendricks, who portrays the — ahem — sexually frisky office manager.

Christina is nominated to be nominated (whatever) for Babylon. I’m all for it.

Lookey here!

…60^th Primetime Emmy® Awards’ top ten vote-getters for outstanding drama series… as voted on by the entire Television Academy.

Not that anyone here isn’t expecting the nomination. The thing is, we need the nomination. Because sure, Hollywood is all abuzz, and now the ad world is all abuzz, but what we need? Some frigging red carpet time. We need John Q Public (I cannot believe I just used that) to know who the fuck we are. (Not we, but, y’know, Mad Men). And I’m thinking that win or lose, nothing will take care of that more effectively than Jon Hamm and Christina Hendricks telling Joan and Melissa who they’re wearing.

The emmy nominees will be announced at 5:40 a.m. (Whyyy???) on Thursday, July 17. And Christ. I’m a slave to this frigging blog now. Yup. I’ll be watching. My post will be up by 6:00.

Kisses, basketcases!

(Note: Roberta and I decided on a once-a-week news summary, but it’s only Wednesday and this is already a huge post, so here’s a half-week summary for your reading pleasure.)

The New York Times was a gift that kept on giving. After last week’s Sunday article, we had a major feature in Monday’s Business Day section.

The series was even the subject of an $8,000 question on a recent episode of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire,” asking which business “Mad Men” is about. When a contestant asked the audience for help, 86 percent answered correctly.

And hey! The article says there’s going to be a 2009 wall calendar. Sweet.

But that’s not all. The Times is creating buzz elsewhere. New York Magazine’s Culture Vulture writes about the Sunday Times cover story:

We shamefully haven’t caught the first season of the show — by the time Nussbaum and Sternbergh starting telling us how good it was, in unison, last summer, we just had fallen too far behind and were secretly hoping it would tank so we wouldn’t have to catch up. But thanks to the stupid New York Times Magazine, we can’t put it off any longer. Now we have to (sigh) go buy the DVDs of season one when they come out on July 7, and (sigh) sit down in front of our TV, and (long sigh) watch all thirteen hours of it. And then we have to watch the new season too! We’re sure it’ll be great, but jeez, that’s a lot of hours.

TV Squad gets in on the act, using a photo from the article, linking, and quoting.

Meanwhile, someone has to disagree, and the butthead of the week is Sacha Zimmerman of The New Republic, who calls the Times article “a fawning hagiography” and complains that the show is mannered and false. To prove that the show is winkingly self-aware, Zimmerman quotes from the first and last episodes; because there just isn’t that much in between. I agree that if the show was as self-conscious as the “magic machine that makes copies” line, I might have stopped watching early on. Fortunately, there are very few such lines to be found.

TV with MeeVee also linked the article as worthwhile “lunchtime reading.”

In other news, Daily Emerald has an article on summer television:

The smart, surprising and provocative drama is the most stylish show on TV. I would watch for the wardrobe alone, but witty lines like “Love was invented by guys like me to sell Nylons” make it my favorite show of the last decade.

The second season promises to feature more than its share of the two things that have made the show great: secrets and sex.

Entertainment Weekly included Mad Men on its list of 100 “New Classics” TV shows (at #91).

Christina Hendricks was named the IGN TV Babe of the Day. (Yeah, yeah, Whedonesque probably already reported it.) (On edit: Of course they did.)

The (Chicago) Daily Herald has an article on serious summer shows which notes that Mad Men is “stylish” and returning for a second season.

This is a delightful piece about the screening the other night of 2:01 written by Pat, the former college roommate of Linda Brettler, better known to us as Matthew Weiner’s wife. Yeah. There were five seats reserved. Matt, Linda, Pat, Roberta and Deborah. What? Oh, I’m sorry, there were only three. Anyway, enjoy!

Before I know it, I am linking arms with Jon Hamm, smiling like I’d died and gone to Heaven. Next thing I know, there I am, squished between Christina and January, the two most beautiful women I’ve ever been physically close to (apologies to Linda, my other college roommates, and all my female friends and relatives). And did John Slattery actually touch my waist (if it can still be called that)?

Sorry to be posting like, every hour this weekend. This half-hour special on AMC is really fun. It’s showing at all kinds of odd times throughout the month. I was sure I also read that, starting tomorrow, you could watch it on AMC.com, but now I can’t find that in writing.

It’s nicely grouped clips, and discussion with the cast (Hamm, Slattery and Kartheiser on the boys’ side (literally), and Moss, Jones and Hendricks on the girls’. And then Weiner finally chimes in.

This manages to be a very exciting promo piece with minimal spoilage.

Watch With Kristin has juicy juice.

First of all, there’s a picture of Christine Hendricks I just can’t decide about. Is that from the lipstick focus group in Babylon, or is that a haircut or new do from Season 2?

But this is my favorite part:

For when you launch that Mad Men Wiki, please note that according to Weiner, the characters’ ages circa season one are as follows: Don is “mid-30s,” Betty is 28, Peggy is 20, Joan is “older than Peggy” and Vincent Kartheiser’s diabolical yet darling Pete is 26.

Because Roberta and I work so hard to figure out the back story, so this is going to be really helpful.

(in case you are super spoiler conscious…)

For Those Who Think Young.

According to Spoiler TV.

And okay, let’s not obsess and go at it like hawks. Let’s just enjoy it! it’s beautiful.

And speaking of obsessing, enjoying, and beautiful…

I call it, My New Wallpaper.

(And I mean, in my bathroom, not on my desktop.)

Oh No They Didn’t has the sexy sexy photo.

As hullabaloo mentioned in a comment, this month’s issue of Vanity Fair has a nice little piece on Mad Men, written by Jonathan Kelly. And quite a photo (by Sam Jones).

His descriptions are killer:

Don Draper…, dark, mysterious, breathtakingly handsome, yet emotionally castrated…

…Draper’s wife, Betty…, is the gorgeous orchid, frozen in Eisenhower-era black-and-white.

And do NOT miss the behind the scenes of the photo shoot. Mostly just Kelly speaking about the show. Kinda like us. (Though he does refer to “Christina Hendrickson”. D’OH!)