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 on screen, 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:
As of this morning, some episodes were also mislabeled, so you had to click on the episode labeled “Babylon” to see Roger’s stomach-churning display. It’s the kind of moment for which Mad Men’s own “Not great, Bob!” meme was invented.
This is, unfortunately, not the first time this has happened when a classic series has changed platforms and/or formats. Most shows that originated in the 20th century were filmed in standard definition, in the classic 4:3 aspect ratio. Putting the images into a higher resolution, and then reframing them for widescreen television, has created similar problems. Crew members could also be seen in some Buffy the Vampire Slayer shots when the supernatural teen drama was converted to widescreen. “Gender Bender,” an X-Files episode about a killer who can change back and forth from male to female, when moved to widescreen had a shot where you could see the male actor lurking at the edge of the frame, just waiting to swap in for his female counterpart.
Those issues came from adding material to the sides of the image to fit the wider frame. But cropping the tops and bottoms of images also causes problems, particularly with visual comedy. When Seinfeld went widescreen, certain shots no longer featured the pothole George Costanza was complaining about in an episode literally called “The Pothole.” An episode of The Simpsons where Homer visits the Duff brewery lost one of its best sight gags when it first arrived on Disney+, cropped for widescreen:
But the problem goes beyond a change of aspect ratio. Remastering shows that were originally shot with more primitive technology sometimes goes horribly awry, like an I Love Lucy clip that went viral last year showing a pair of once-blurry background actors brought into so much focus that they now looked like surreal Picasso sketches.
I visited the set of Frasier in the late nineties, as the TV industry was preparing for the shift from standard to hi-def. As I admired the decor of Dr. Crane’s living room, one of the acclaimed sitcom’s producers lamented that all of it would look much shabbier in HD than in the more visually forgiving SD format, and worried that they’d have to go to the expense of rebuilding all of their standing sets. Frasier, Lucy, and so many others were created without a thought to how they might one day look in a format that didn’t even exist at the time.
While countless classic movies have been successfully remastered for HD or 4K, they’re also standalone projects, where real care and attention can be given to each frame. Seinfeld and I Love Lucy both made 180 episodes. The Simpsons made 429 episodes in standard-def. Doing quality control with that amount of product is very difficult, which is how so many of these mistakes get made. (In the case of The Simpsons, Disney+ eventually introduced an option to watch the first 20 seasons in their original aspect ratio.) Every now and then you get a situation like The Wire, whose creator David Simon insisted on being involved in the process of changing the gritty urban drama’s image quality and aspect ratio, but it’s rare.
This specific Mad Men error is an odd one, since the show was always presented in HD widescreen. But the first four seasons were shot on film, so perhaps in the remastering process, someone inadvertently used an alternate take of the vomit scene where the crew members hadn’t been digitally erased. A source close to the process said that Lionsgate gave HBO Max “incorrect files,” and that the proper versions will be uploaded ASAP.
But why was the transfer even 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. Some shows, like Mad Men, don’t need additional polish. Others, like The Wire, were meant to be grubby. When the HD versions were preparing for release, Simon wrote, “While this new version of The Wire is not, in some specific ways, the film we first made, it has sufficient merit to exist as an alternate version. There are scenes that clearly improve in HD and in the widescreen format. But there are things that are not improved. And even with our best resizing, touchups and maneuver, there are some things that are simply not as good.”
In his most famous ad pitch, Don Draper explained that, “Technology is a glittering lure, but there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on the level beyond flash, if they have a sentimental bond with the product.” We have a sentimental bond with the greatest TV shows. Maybe it’s OK to leave them as they were, even if there are black bands on the sides of the image, or you can’t see every trace of stubble on Don’s jaw.
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