HBO Max Butchers ‘Mad Men’ in Botched ‘Remastering’

Alan Sepinwall, writing for Wired (News+ link in case Wired’s paywall busts your balls):

Last month, HBO Max announced a major new addition to its library. Not only would the streamer be adding Mad Men — a show that HBO execs infamously passed on back when Matthew Weiner was a writer on The Sopranos — but it would be presenting the period drama’s episodes in a new 4K remastering. This would, according to the press release, give “audiences and longtime Mad Men fans the opportunity to enjoy the series’ authentically crafted elements with crisp detail and enhanced visual clarity.”

As it turned out, there was perhaps too much clarity. Not long after the series went live on HBO Max, a screencap began floating around social media from a scene in the Season One episode “Red in the Face,” where Roger Sterling is vomiting in front of a group of horrified Sterling Cooper clients. When it aired — and in the version still available on AMC+ — seven men are onscreen, all of them wearing period-appropriate suits and ties. The HBO Max version, on the other hand, features two men who appear very out of place in 1960: crew members lurking in the background, feeding a hose to create the illusion that actor John Slattery is puking.

It’s not like the crew members are only partially on-screen, or out of focus far in the background. They’re right there. It’s glaringly obvious that no one at HBO Max even watched this. That’s how rotten the culture at Warner Bros. Discovery is. They obtained the rights to one of the greatest TV shows ever made (one that I personally hold alongside The Sopranos as my favorite ever), processed the episodes in some sort of “remastering” that did not need to happen, and didn’t even bother to watch the fucking new versions they produced before putting them on their service for the world to stream.

AMC+ has the entire original series, as originally broadcast, and it looks gorgeous. I bought all seven seasons from iTunes back in the day, and they look as good, if not better, in those versions. David Zaslav — a well-known idiot — should go to prison for this.

★ Tuesday, 2 December 2025