When you watched Don Draper drop the needle on The Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” during Sunday night’s episode of Mad Men, was your immediate reaction, “Holy crap, how much did that cost to license?” You were not alone. As you may recall, when Conan’s band played “Lovely Rita” on air during the last days of his Tonight Show run, a lot of people assumed it was a calculated budget-hit middle-finger to NBC. According to Questlove, who knows some stuff about playing walk-on music for late-night talk shows, the price tag for that blip of Beatles would be $500,000. He turned out to be wrong in that particular instance, because NBC had a blanket license with Apple Corps that made usage cheaper. But, obviously, getting The Beatles is never cheap. So what kind of cash are we talking about? Satiating inside-baseball curiosity, ArtsBeat dug around and got the numbers for Mad Men’s Beatles placement: For that bit of sitar magic, the show doled out a cool quarter of a million dollars. Nuts, right?
By Mark Lisanti at
David T. Cole/Grantland illustration
[Production notes: This is the second week of the Power Rankings on Grantland. Let's see if we can all get out of here before 3,000 words, OK? As always, we make no guarantees as to the accuracy of transcribed dialogue, period detail, or phonetic transcriptions of ostensibly Cockney accents. Rankings are arbitrary — maddeningly so — and should not be the basis for cash wagers unless you are a crazy person.
By Mark Lisanti at
David T. Cole/Grantland illustration
[Production notes: The Power Rankings have moved to Grantland! Very exciting. Unfortunately, the content will be in no way improved in the transition; expect the usual shoddy attention to accuracy, laziness of thought, and prurience of intent. Actually, that's not entirely true: There's now an upgraded, more elegant logo with a bigger DDFBTL bolt. Evolution! Also, please bear with us as we remember how to do this; the show's been off the air for 14 years, a time during which we did nothing but drink bargain whiskey directly from a giant plastic bottle with a built-in handle. But now it's back, and we are very, very excited to once again appropriate Matthew Weiner's hard work for our own nefarious purposes.
Season 4 Power Rankings can be found here. Ranks do not carry over from last season, except when they do.]
What have we all done with ourselves in the 14 years since the last Mad Men episode aired? (It's been 14 years, right?) You're probably going to answer, "Lived full and productive lives," and if so, good on you. But we've done nothing but sit in a darkened office, ruefully swishing some rye around in a glass while waiting for further instructions from Matthew Weiner. In the meantime, things like this video come into our lives (featuring a song that blissfully falls outside of the Anachronism Police's jurisdiction), and we momentarily have something else to do besides drunkenly hone our fingerbanging technique on an unfortunate couch pillow until the season premiere finally arrives this Sunday night. Yeah, it's been a long, lonely 14 years.
"I feel like that’s the way it is right now. That’s what I feel we’re undergoing — such tremendous change. Technological, cultural, social, our perception of ourselves as a country, our perception of each other. The country really feels like a melting pot, like it’s culturally diverse as ever and representative. And at the same time I personally — I don’t know what period I’m looking to — but I don’t feel like my feet are on the ground. And what you realize is this is the way it is.” — Matthew Weiner
Mad Men's back. Let's get tanked. Like futuristic car unveilings of the atomic past, Mad Men is rolling out its brand-new window displays for the new year, and the fins are bigger than ever! Series creator Matthew Weiner gave fans some new clues during the TCA cocktail party and in a long interview with The Hollywood Reporter. The highlights:
Just because Matthew Weiner has a new $30 million deal and an armload of Emmys doesn't mean he can't carry a few grudges, too. On Friday night the Mad Men creator stopped by Largo in Los Angeles for a discussion with Curb Your Enthusiasm's Jeff Garlin. With no particular agenda, the talk was a free-flowing conversation that often touched on people and things that have pissed Weiner off over the past few years. Below, six people on his shit list. Plus, some hints on how Mad Men's final season will end.
Just yesterday Vulture, in a thorough, prescient think piece, asked the question, “What’s really going on at AMC?” Today we may have an answer: They’re broke. Not in terms of quality or prestige, certainly — not even the infamously unsolved murder of Rosie Larsen can take the shine off Don Draper’s cufflinks or Walter White’s meth lab. But there’s no other way to receive the announcement of how, exactly, the network plans on killing time between now and March, when Roger Sterling can finally start drinking again.
