TVSquad

AMC.com has been holding a contest for the past few months where they asked fans of Mad Men to send in video tapes where they re-enact a scene from the show. The network supplied the specific scene and script and you had to film your version of it. They got tons of entries. Here are the 18 finalists.

Almost all of them are quite good, and you can see that many of these people could be actors (not that a few of them aren't already). My favorites are actually the ones where a male will take a scene featuring a female like Betty, Joan, or Peggy and really recreate the scene. Jacob Crumbine's video is in the lead right now, and it's great. Even if Mad Men didn't exist, I'd watch whatever show this was. Rebecca De Ornelas recreates one of Betty's psychiatrist office scenes and does it very well. Mike Kimmel does the same scene and he's a natural. Valerie Long's drunken chat with a lamp works too. Sabina Maschi's entry is very, very clever.

If you're a fan of Twitter, the site where you microblog using only 140 characters max for each post, then you might have heard that several Mad Men characters have been on the site too. At first many people thought that this was cool marketing by AMC or the producers of the show, but actually they were accounts created by fans and AMC didn't like that. Now they've forced Twitter to take down the accounts.

The accounts affected include Don Draper, Peggy Olson, and Joan Holloway, though several other Twitters from other characters on the show seem to be safe (for now). The official word on it is that it was a copyright infringement problem.

This is really too bad. Some of the most creative, fun posts on Twitter are being done by fictional people (not just Mad Men but others as well). I would hope that AMC would hire some people to take over the accounts for each character, to be the official Twitter bloggers for the show. It's a great way to market it.

Update: AMC and Twitter have restored the accounts!

(S02E05) "This is America. Pick a job and become the person who does it." - Bobbie, to Don

Is there any other show on TV right now that packs so much stuff into one episode? So many revelations, so many character developments, so many nuances? People who only have the attention span for music videos have complained that "nothing ever happens" on Mad Men, but I say that more happens in an episode of this show than three or four of most other shows on the air right now.

This episode was amazing. Not only did we get the background story on one of the big mysteries of the first season (if this was Lost the message boards would be going crazy right now), we got to see a different side of a few characters and the very welcome (if quick) return of an old favorite. Though I wonder how her new situation will affect Don in the upcoming episodes.

Since today marks the release of the first season DVD set for Mad Men, I thought I'd pass this little bit of news on to fans of the show: they're holding a contest and the winner gets a walk-on role on the show!

Now, this isn't one of those easy "send an e-mail" or "mail in a coupon" type of contest. You're gonna have to work a little bit for this one. You have to go to the link above and print out a monologue from the show and film yourself doing it. Then you upload the video to AMC's web site. The winner gets a walk-on in a future episode and a free trip to Los Angeles.