With just one episode left in this year’s remarkable Mad Men season, AMC has cheerily released an “official” press release announcing the latest merger for the ad men, including a look at the new firm’s new logo and adorable comments from all of its partners. The memo was shared on Mad Men’s Facebook page after last night’s show (and subsequently shared by every person you know on social media), and while it’s certainly fun to gaze at, it’s even more fun to use as the jumping off point for some Mad Men activities (and, we’ll admit it now, to delve ever-deeper into the finely-tuned historical elements of the ever-accurate show). Let’s have some fun.

Don Draper just keeps pulling out the dick moves. And with next week being the season six finale, who knows what he had in store for us? A lot of stuff happened on this week’s Mad Men installment, “The Quality of Mercy,” written by Andre and Maria Jacquemetton and directed by Phil Abraham. So much so that Ken Cosgrove gets shot in the face in the first few minutes and it’s barely a blip on the overall drama scale. Another great episode, this one really sets the stage for the impending finale. It also featured Roger Sterling’s proclamation that he “once held Lee Garner Jr.’s balls!” if that’s any indication. Well, not really. But that line sure tickles. As noted, Don behaved pretty poorly this week, which makes for great television, but not necessarily for making his character any more likable. Don is still pretty worked up over the Sally-caused coitus interruptus… to the point where he is acting like Kirsten Cohen from The O.C. and stealthily spiking his orange juice with vodka. And taking the day off work. He is also very peeved by the growing camaraderie between Peggy and Ted, to the point where he goes out of his way in a meeting to embarrass the hell out of Ted and rob Peggy of her idea for the St. Joseph aspirin campaign.

Sad that Game of Thrones is done for the year? Not excited to see Mad Men go shortly, as well? August 11th and Breaking Bad aren’t coming soon enough? Your summer TV slate might be a little sparse at the moment, but that doesn’t mean things aren’t about to heat up. Take Under the Dome, the miniseries event from CBS based on the novel of the same name by Stephen King. It’s got a small New England town mysteriously engulfed by an impenetrable force field in the shape of a dome. It’s got plenty of sci-fi and inter-community politics, themes of an apocalyptic nature and from the looks of it, plenty of secrets. It’s also got a great cast, including the likes of Mike Vogel, Rachelle Lefevre, Breaking Bad‘s Dean Norris, Natalie Martinez and Nicholas Strong. And based on this new 3-minute trailer, it might be the answer to your summer television woes.

Too hot to leave the house? Need to catch up some docs you missed during the last run of film festivals? Just don’t want to get off the couch? It’s okay, HBO will reward your laziness with their own mini-film festival, one that plays in the comfort of your own home and within the confines of your own television screen. HBO Documentary Films Summer Series returns for another round of hot (forgive the summer puns, please) programming, featuring eleven documentaries that truly run the gamut of available non-fiction cinema. The series kicked off last night with the HBO debut of Mike Lerner and Maxim Pozdorovin’s still shockingly relevant Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer. The Sundance premiere investigates Russia’s most notorious punk band, Pussy Riot, and their ceaseless desire to challenge the status quo (and their very government) that have landed them in jail and turned them into modern day free speech crusaders. Pussy Riot: A Punk Prayer is far from the only feature plucked from high profile festivals around the world, as the series also includes films that have shown at the Seattle International Film Festival, the upcoming Los Angeles Film Festival, the Toronto International Film Festival, and the Tribeca Film Festival. The subject matters addressed in the series include classic Hollywood starlets, unexpected beauty queens, public defenders, horrific murders, single moms looking for love, and even a couple of already-lauded features like Gasland Part II and The Crash Reel. It may be a cliche, but this series really does offer something for everyone. And – again

Bob Benson didn’t need to have a bombshell of a secret. In fact, history dictated that Bob Benson wasn’t going to have a bombshell of a secret. And yet, the Mad Men newcomer, played by James Wolk, raised suspicion from the moment he waltzed onto (the wrong floor, inevitably) of SCD&P (now just the offensive-to-everyone SC&P) in the series’ sixth season. Benson, a new accounts man, could have easily been regulated to a background bit – after all, even perennial accounts man Ken Cosgrove hasn’t gotten much play this season, save for his spectacular tap dancing sequence during the season’s drug-fueled “The Crash” – but the handsome Wolk has popped up in no less than eight episodes of the show’s latest season, and he’s been inscrutable at every turn. Wolk is also not some fresh face that comes without baggage – if you’re familiar with his work on such ambitious shows as the ill-fated Lone Star or the underappreciated Political Animals, you are also familiar with his panache for playing characters with major secrets comes part and parcel with seeing him on television. Wolk isn’t the guy you cast for some small part, he’s the guy you look to for some steadily building, multi-faceted character work. The Bob Benson conspiracy theories have run the gamut (he’s a government spy! he’s a mole from another ad agency! he’s an undercover journalist! he’s just a total lunatic!), and while the real truth (or whatever “real truth” that Mad Men is willing to

This week’s Mad Men is called “Favors.” Which thematically, makes a lot of sense, as Bob does a favor for Pete via Manolo the male nurse, Peggy asks a late night favor of Stan, Don does a huge solid for Sylvia and the list goes on. But so much more happens. Being Mad Men, these favors are not exactly selfless ones. Though this episode in particular, written by Semi Chellas and Matthew Weiner and directed by Jennifer Getzinger, did a lot to propel the show toward its season finale in two weeks. While there were a few drawbacks, it was a very dynamic Mad Men installment, boasting two brilliant standout scenes, amazing performances, and some show-changing events that up the stakes for the finale.

Spoilers for Game of Thrones through the end of season three begin now. Consider yourselves warned, lowborns. The formula is there, all executive producers David Benioff and D.B. Weiss have to do is follow it. In season one, a massive ninth episode saw the head of the show’s poster hero roll in “Baelor.” What followed was a tenth episode that reshuffled the deck, brought into focus the “War of the Five Kings” and propelled the story forward with little stops along the way with all of our favorite supporting characters. At the end of season two, the massive, focused effort of “Blackwater” was followed by a road-trip around Westeros (and beyond) to check in on all the now-scattered pieces of what remained. The War of the Five Kings certainly wasn’t over, but it had hit its most dire hours. Armies burned to a crisp, the men of the North far from home and a Queen on the far side of the world barely escaping with her life and those of her dragons. For season three, there was no other way to end. After “The Rains of Castamere,” or more appropriately The Red Wedding, an event so monumentally brutal that it instantly became one of the cornerstones of this show’s very legacy, the only way to go would be softer, quieter, warmer. Otherwise no one would want to wait a year to see what happens next. And so it went with “Mhysa,” season three’s uneventful reshuffling. Some pieces had to be

Having drawn (incredibly poor, it has to be noted, though damn if Shoshanna isn’t like a new wave Charlotte) comparisons to Sex and the City since the day it premiered, it seems only inevitable that Lena Dunham’s HBO series Girls is now the subject (victim?) of its own “totally unauthorized and unofficial” walking tour in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Yesterday, Dunham herself Instagrammed a picture of a flyer (you can see it after the break) touting the tour that was apparently heartily taped to some sort of utility pole, presumably somewhere in Brooklyn (where Dunham lives). She amusingly captioned the ‘gram “Sign me uppp!!!” We like you, Lena. The tour’s flyer promises that you will accomplish the following during your tour of Greenpoint: “find out where Hannah whips up cappuccinos, tour the playgrounds of McGorlick Park, gawk at the exterior of an apartment building where Adam Driver’s character bench presses iron, discover where cast and crew have martinis after the last shot of the day (no pun intended!).” There are also notes about getting “insider tips” on how to make your own Tiny Furniture and a tempting offer for free Pabst Blue Ribbons. There is no way this tour is real. To reiterate: this tour promises to take you to the outside of an apartment building and then get you drunk on cheap beer. They also promise that you’ll get to hold a Golden Globe for a souvenir photo, which raises the question: just where did these wily tour operators get a

Fox and NBC have announced their fall lineup, and it’s hard not to notice some similarities between their offerings. Even beyond the standard “here’s a family comedy! Here’s a parenting comedy! Here’s some new police procedurals!” the premises of these shows are remarkably similar. So similar, in fact, that it’s like  Armageddon and Deep Impact happening right in your living room. For example, both networks have…

If you’ve finally managed to catch your breath after a couple of notably bloody weeks across some of television’s best shows (hell, someone even got stabbed, twice, on Mad Men last week, and we won’t even comment on Game of Thrones’ Red Wedding in this space), it might be high time to start thinking ahead to what will undoubtedly be a bloody end of summer. High time? Get it? We’re talking about Vince Gilligan‘s Breaking Bad on AMC here. With the second half of the show’s fifth season (season 5.5?) finally hitting the small screen with a Bryan Cranston-directed premiere episode on August 11th, marketing has started to slowly waft out across the internet like so many meth fumes through your friendly neighborhood cook house. Sure, the first look at the show’s newest poster (and a very brief ten-second teaser trailer, which you can check out over at The Wrap if you feel like sitting through thirty seconds of ads before you get to what is also an ad and essentially a glorified motion poster) are tantalizingly brief (the poster doesn’t even bother to really name the show or its home network), they also make no bones about what is going to happen in the final eight episodes. “All bad things must come to an end.” Did you think this would go on forever? Did you think things were going to end happily? Did you forget about the meth? We haven’t and we can’t. And we also can’t wait to see just how things will end for the show when

The original 3 seasons of Arrested Development that ran from 2003-2006 represent arguably the highest form of situation comedy. The show contrived and constructed a complex web of intersecting situations within each episode that continually developed and overlapped with each other throughout the series. Gags like Tobias’s coming out as a denim-cutoff-donning “never-nude” were briefly hinted at, later explained, then circuitously referenced during the rest of the series as the characters and the ensemble developed through a fast-paced narrative. It’s Arrested Development’s deft balance of many simultaneous situations that made it such a continually rewarding, notably risky, and certainly groundbreaking show for network television: the show remunerates the attentive viewer by returning to gags and referencing situations from past episodes even as present situations rapidly advance. I can’t think of another show before it that successfully and inventively got so much mileage out of individual revisited gags. Rather than simply repeat the same gag, like a catchphrase, Arrested Development laboriously re-contextualized prior jokes with big and small variations on their results (e.g., the many ways Michael forgets who Anne is). Netflix’s new season of Arrested Development is, as reported, comparably ambitious in its approach to the situation comedy. The show makes good on its promise of audacity by replacing its prior experimentation with the situation with an experiment in structure.

I’m not a big fan of TV Shows with laugh tracks. It might be pretentious, but it always seemed like laugh tracks were a crutch for shows with bad writing, like hearing it made you more likely to laugh at a joke you’d otherwise roll your eyes at. This always made me uncomfortable because it seemed like such a pretentious thought. My shows, like Arrested Development and Futurama, don’t need laugh tracks because they’re better (I’d think to myself) and you idiots wouldn’t know good writing if it got way too high, fell asleep on your couch and woke up in the middle of the night to eat all your cereal (Good Writing is kind of a stoner). But good news, everyone: that pretentious thought was wrong. Laugh tracks have nothing to do with the quality of writing, and everything to do with what the show is about.

There’s a scene in Silver Linings Playbook, one of last year’s big Oscar contenders, in which Bradley Cooper’s mentally unstable character, Pat Solitano, is reading Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms. He ends up tossing the book through a window, following with a rant about the unnecessary heartbreak that plays out near the end of the oft-assigned reading for high schoolers. It’s bullshit, he shouts in the wee hours of the morning (I’m paraphrasing, of course). Why should an otherwise heroic and heartwarming story end with such agony? Mental instability aside, I know that feeling. I remember it vividly. My moment occurred similar to that of the fictional Pat, both happened in the wee hours of the morning and both involved throwing a book violently in disgust with a particular turn of events. The only difference, of course, is that I don’t look much like Bradley Cooper. And the slayer of my goodwill and optimism wasn’t Ernest Hemingway, it was George R.R. Martin. Tonight, somewhere around 10:00PM in whatever time zone you reside, those of you who have never read any of the Song of Fire and Ice books found out exactly to what I am referring. And thanks to some exceptional storytelling choices by the Game of Thrones team, you really got to feel it. Like that night I put a dent in the wall with A Storm of Swords, this is one you’ll never forget.

Our boys at SCDP and CGC are allegedly operating as one entity, they even came up with an “equally offensive” new name of Sterling Cooper & Partners, though it’s hard to believe that either of the halves will ever function as a whole, as proved by this week’s episode, aptly titled “A Tale of Two Cities,” written by Janet Leahy and Matthew Weiner and directed by John Slattery. Separate forces divide and try to concur as they make meetings to reel in new accounts. But every man is for himself, naturally, and their motivations aren’t necessarily for the good of the firm as a whole. Maintaining the momentum of last week’s brilliant episode, this one perhaps equals it in overall quality and explores office politics versus more personal relationships. And parallelled with the office unrest are the riots at the Democratic National Convention. Don and Roger head to Los Angeles with Harry with the hopes to seal the deal with Carnation. While Don is uncharacteristically prepping on the plane, Roger tells him to stop, saying, “Our biggest challenge? Not getting syphilis.” So we know Roger’s main motivation for the trip. Don, however, is making an effort to be good where Megan is concerned, though that doesn’t stop him from making out with some actress at a hash party later.

Resurrected like a dead dove by Netflix, there’s no doubt that Arrested Development 4.0 is a beast made specifically for the internet. It’s no longer bound by commercial breaks (only answering to the internal metrics for how the streaming service defines commercial success) or the act structure and 22-minute length traditional TV entails. With the same bulk-drop mentality that Netflix started with House of Cards (which gets its own AD shout out), viewers can choose whether they want to watch one episode per week, a handful at a time, or all in one sitting. These are the two major structural differences that streaming provides, but there’s also the instantaneousness of social media that was largely missing when the show originally ran on FOX between 2003 and February 2006, ending its third season almost exactly a month before Twitter launched. It’s also not hard to imagine that it was the internet that brought the show back. With fan pages dedicated to connecting all of its dots and collecting all the quotes, the cult aspect of AD flourished on message boards and in memes alike, and its popularity within Netflix’s own walls must have been an enticement to push for a fourth season. All of that makes it feel a bit like the show once dubbed “too smart” for TV was an orphaned child who’s found the home she was always meant to live in. But like all families, there’s a bit of disfunction. The original run of the show was marked by clever turns of

In the wise words of the J. Geils Band, “love stinks.” Love is different to different people. Some hold onto another person out of a matter of convenience. Some for lust. Some for nostalgia. Some probably don’t even know what “love” is really supposed to be – well, that’s probably most of us. And those at SCDP/CGC are no better off. This week’s exceptional Mad Men, ’The Better Half,” written by Erin Levy and Matthew Weiner and directed by Phil Abraham, examines the relationships of some of the characters, past and present. Between Don, Betty, Peggy, Ted, Roger, and Joan, feelings for old flames are stirred up and idealized or new options come into the mix, but are any of these feelings well-founded? Probably not. “The Better Half” provides a great balance of characters’ stories, some excellent writing (as usual), and such a striking examination of the interpersonal relationships on the show. This hour-long episode covers an impressive amount of ground and was one of the best of the season so far.

Well, that was a little awkward, was it not? Last night’s episode of Game of Thrones was far more glamorous than usual. The slightly more modern shift in setting, the sequins, the 15% increase in gay sex action. Also, the addition of Matt Damon to the cast is a real win for this series. It’s about time they started to pull in some bigger names, this is a cultural revolution, after all. Wait, that can’t be right. What did I just watch? Ah yes, Game of Thrones was off this week to make way for the premiere of Behind The Candelabra, the film about Liberace and his man-friend. So while there will not be any episode to review, Blog of Thrones continues its march across the lands of Westeros. There’s always something to discuss. So lets start with this week’s most important question: Was Behind the Candelabra fabulous, or what?

Game of Thrones is many things, least among them is subtle about its weekly themes. It’s part of the experience, as we’ve seen it develop over the years, to watch D.B. Weiss, David Benioff and the rest of the writing team parse together stories from all over the world of Ice and Fire in a way that makes them fit together despite great geographical, philosophical and tonal differences. This week’s episode, “Second Sons,” is no different. It’s the kind of slower, more meticulous episode that digs a little deeper into the greater notions of faith and honor, love and duty. It’s also filled with moments both sweet and sour for characters we like, those we don’t and those whose true nature is yet to be revealed to us. It is on this note that we begin our weekly Blog of Thrones discussion of episode eight, a sweet and sour appetizer to whatever darkness lays ahead. From here, there will be advanced talking points from this week’s episode, “Second Sons.” Read on at your own peril.

We all get burned out from time to time, but it seems that when ad men get burned out, things really go awry. Especially when there may or may not be steroids or some weird “stimulant” involved. This week’s Mad Men, “The Crash,” is a surreal, fever dream of an episode. Nightmarish events occur, but you won’t find any dream sequences here. Written by Jason Grote and Matthew Weiner and directed by Michael Uppendahl, this episode throws its viewers down the same drugged up rabbit hole as the characters. And while it features some of those questionable Dick Whitman whorehouse flashbacks, it’s a very strong one in terms of the overall immersive effect of Uppendahl’s direction and the dark aura that it leaves behind. Chevy has put a lot of deadlines upon the yet-to-be-named super agency, and they need to work all weekend to come up with a slew of new ideas for the campaign. Don isn’t feeling well, Ken got into a car accident test driving with the powers-that-be at Chevy, and many are saddened by Frank Gleeson’s passing, so Jim Cutler reasons that it’s a good idea to get a doctor to come to the office to inject any ailing parties with a stimulant which is supposed to keep them creative for over twenty-four hours.

In this week’s edition of Blog of Thrones, I’m going to tell you a few things that I learned from reading George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire books. Not spoilers, obviously. But insights that make this week’s episode of Game of Thrones, appropriately titled “The Bear and the Maiden Fair,” all the more poignant and interesting. Because this week’s episode is rife with symbolism and plenty of George R.R. Martin’s favorite things. It’s appropriate then, that this week’s episode is also season three’s writing credit for Martin. It’s an episode that so perfectly embues all that makes Martin a fun read, that not talking about the books a bit would be a missed opportunity. And like the show it covers, Blog of Thrones does not miss opportunities. From here, there will be advanced talking points from this week’s episode, “The Bear and the Maiden Fair.” Read on at your own peril.