I’ve been a huge Mad Men fan since it first aired. (In 2007, would you believe.) But I wasn’t so bothered about the delay in the current season getting under way because I knew in the UK it was moving to Sky Atlantic, Rupert Murdoch’s big effort to get (mainly) Virgin Media customers like me to jump platforms on the basis of great, exclusive content, much of it from HBO or in a similar vein.
I’ve written about my favourite all-time TV shows here before (HBO favourites – who’s on your ‘traction list’?) and I’ve had plenty of woes with Virgin’s cableco down the years.
But since Mad Men started up a few weeks back it’s been especially painful.
Mad Men is one of the few brands I follow on Facebook. I started doing so a couple of years back and the efforts by its US creators AMC to engage fans in that environment were pretty poor. Bland, written Q&As with every minor character you can think of come to mind.
But they’ve upped their game. While I’m going cold turkey and being taunted by friends with Sky or no scruples about torrent-ing their hard drives to overload, I’m witnessing something approaching proper integration between the TV broadcasts and social media.
It doesn’t help that the US and UK airings are so close together, something that years ago was laughably not the case.
And of course this isn’t all about Mad Men. For other good shows on air – recently Homeland comes to mind – it’s a paradox that time-shifting DVR boxes and TiVo have made it easier than ever to control viewing times but that social media means it’s easier than ever to be exposed to spoilers.
(I recently wrote about this in relation to sport shown on TV – How “I don’t want to know the score” got so hard.)
While I complain about Sky, how switching would likely be cocked up in some way, even the old ugly-satellite-dish-on-the-side-of-house chestnut, I am indeed close to changing providers.
They got to me.
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tphallett 
ginblog
May 19, 2012
I seem to have lost my Mad Men interest at around the time it moved from BBC 4. Most serial dramas seem to turn into soap operas around series 3 or 4, regardless of nominal genre, and MM was no different. I only really watched it for the advertising talk, and there was less and less of that and more and more of various dysfunctional people in this or that combination with other dysfunctional people. I get enough of that in real life, I don’t need to pay the other Rupert for further helpings.
tphallett
May 19, 2012
I hear what you’re saying but can’t seem to pull myself away.