RED RIGHT HAND 40 12 00 20 16 02 16 52 02 50 44 46 30 32 20 00 46 38 16 42

Red Right Hand: ONE COMING IN, ONE GOING OUT
*He is not a secret agent. Not at all.

 

ONE COMING IN, ONE GOING OUT

Hey, look at me shilling this thing they call Mad Men.

I've been looking forward to this for, like, a year. This is a little bit of what we need more of in TV. Ignore what's hot and just do something cool. Period piece? Early sixties? About ad men? Fuck, yes. And creator (and I believe sole writer) Matt Weiner's got a decent track record.



Leave it to AMC, the American home of Hu$tle, to try something different. These are the same guys who've got Warren Ellis working on something for them (called Dead Channel, a little bit of b.g courtesy of Televisionary). Whether or not it actually gets on the air, these guys get credit for being forward thinking enough to go to someone forward thinking and say "Hey, how about TV?" This is the same Warren Ellis who created Global Frequency, which was then turned into a pilot so good that it busted out on to the internet, rustled up an immediate following and was subsequently killed deader than dead by the network what commissioned it largely out of spite. I digress.

Actor-wise, Mad Men has an interesting array. Sorkinites take note of Elisabeth Moss. Whedonites, behold both Christina Hendricks (Saffron...or whatever...from Firefly) and Angel's Vincent Kartheiser (in what appears to be a not annoying role, unlike when he was Connor). John Slattery (who I really took note of in K Street) is in there.

Lastly, Rosemarie DeWitt (not pictured), who I really enjoyed in Standoff. She was smart and hawt. She plays Midge in Mad Men.

And since we're on the subject of Standoff, it's getting burned off on Fridays on Fox at the mo' and I'm grateful for that. Most shows scarcely get that courtesy and I'm not expecting to see a Standoff DVD set anytime ever. It's a shame it didn't really live up to it's premise. I liked the idea of the his and hers hostage negotiators, but it is a situation that doesn't lend itself to TV all that well. Hostage-of-the-week gets stale and before you know it you're trying to run a twist on every one of them. That and all the action tends to happen on throw phones or cells.

Even with that understood, there were some interesting names in mix on that one. Tim Minear was a consulting producer (though I believe by the time he got there, the writing was already on the wall). Joy Kecken, of The Wire and Homicide, wrote at least one. Carnivale's Daniel Knauf, also in there as a producer.
©2024 Michael Patrick Sullivan
<< Home