TVSquad

I'm not sure why anyone, at this point, hasn't seen the first episode of AMC's Mad Men yet (anyone who wants to see it, that is). The entire first season is up on iTunes, AMC reran the show after the first run, and the DVDs have been out for a couple of weeks now, so there have been a lot of different ways for newbies and fans alike to get caught up on the show if they're interested enough. And now there's another way: AMC has made the first episode available for free on its site.

If you become hooked on the show after watching this first episode (of course you will!), check out AMC on July 20. They're going to have a marathon of the entire first season starting at noon. The second season starts the following Sunday, July 27, on it's new night, Sunday at 10pm.

(After you watch chapter 1 after the jump, click here for chapters 2 and 3.)

(S01E08)

"You know you have to leave the village for a decent screw." - Midge, when asked by a friend where she met Don

So Don gets stoned ("I feel like Dorothy, and everything just turned to color" - must have been his first time) with Midge and her hip beatnik friends and has a flashback of meeting a hobo when he was a kid. That was just one of the revealing moments in this episode, which was really about parties. Midge throws a party with her friends, and Don shows up smokes weed with them. Peggy and the girls and the guys from the office go to P.J. Clarke's to dance and drink (Pete goes too, the hell with helping his wife move into the new apartment), and Sal meets Elliot, one of the sales reps for the lipstick company, at a bar. Elliot makes a play for him (yes, readers, your instincts were correct), but Sal is too scared to do anything about it and just leaves after several drinks.

(S01E07)

"By the way, Matherton? He has the clap." - Pete, to a pretty store clerk.

I have a relative who's an alcoholic, even if he doesn't admit it. But even he doesn't drink as much as Roger Sterling does. My God, did you see how much he sucked down tonight? Straight vodka, whiskey, Martinis with chocolate cake. He even brought in a bottle of vodka as a gift for Don and took a glass - not a cup or bottle, but a glass - of booze and drove home with it. When Don said to him the next day that it looks like he got home OK, I was thinking, you knew he was drinking a lot, so why did you let him drink and drive? Even if it is 1960, the fact that Don wondered if he got home in one piece is proof that drinking and driving was a concern back then too.

I've been going back and forth on whether Roger is a nice, misunderstood guy or a first class jerk. This episode made me tilt a little toward the latter.

(S01E06)

"It was interesting...like watching a dog trying to play the piano." - ad guy Fred, about Peggy's great lipstick ideas.

Someone sent me an e-mail after last week's episode, and the person said that they didn't like Mad Men because "nothing ever happens." I disagree with this statement strongly, but I know what they mean. Nothing ever happens in the sense that there aren't any cliffhangers before each commercial, there aren't any explosions or murders, and there isn't some incredible event that pushes the show in another direction for the next episode. But to say that "nothing every happens" as a general statement about each episode is proof, I think, that we've been conditioned to expect all shows to be the same, and if they have a different pace then it's "boring" or "nothing ever happens."

If Mad Men is boring, then all shows should be this boring.

Hey! Do you guys remember Standoff? It had great actors like Ron Livingston and Gina Torres... it just got kind-of stale after, oh, two episodes. Fox is burning off the remaining 9 episodes of the procedural drama starting this Friday. The show was officially canceled on May 17th when Fox announced its Upfronts schedule for next fall.

The actors from the series have already moved on to other projects. Gina Torres, for example, is preparing for motherhood. She and husband Laurence Fishburne are expecting their first child any day now. And Ron Livingston is currently on stage in the off-Broadway play, In A Dark Dark House, and is still the spokesperson for Sprint Nextel.

Standoff resumes Friday, June 8 at 9 pm on Fox.

Fans of Standoff, the FOX hostage negotiator drama starring Ron Livingston and Rosemarie DeWitt, were worried when it was announced that the show was moving to Fridays. Now here's more to be concerned about: the show isn't returning at all until the summer.

It was supposed to return in April, but FOX has decided the show won't be back until after the network announces its fall schedule in May. I wonder how this will affect their decision, since the show has been on hiatus for a while and they're not going to know what the summer numbers are until, well, the show airs in the summer. They insist the show isn't canceled, but this can't be seen as a "good" sign, that's for sure. It got pretty good numbers when it was on.

For the record, I thought the show was so-so.

Fox has picked up the back nine episodes of the new comedy, 'Til Death, starring Brad Garrett and Joely Fisher. Even though the show hasn't done much in its Thursday night timeslot, Fox thinks there is an audience out there for this sitcom. Fox thinks that 24 and American Idol will draw in more viewers to the network when they begin in January.

The network has also ordered six more episodes of Standoff, starring Ron Livingston and Rosemarie DeWitt (and Gina Torres for all you Firefly fans). A rep for the network says it didn't order the full back nine (considered a full season) because there isn't going to be any room for a full season once 24 and American Idol begin.

You might have noticed that I didn't review last night's episode of Standoff. It's not because of election coverage. I'm just super bored with the show. Here's why.

1. It's like Mad Libs. Seriously, all you have to do is fill in the blanks with each episode's set up, confrontaion, and resolution. The two hostage negotiators are called in, Matt gets on the phone, Emily figures out what's going on in the hostage-taker's life that would make him do this, Frank wants to shoot them instead of talk to them, Matt and Emily banter about their relationship, their boss stands around and looks concerned, and then Matt or Emily talks the person out of doing anything else. Noun-adjective-adverb. Yawn.

(S01E05) This show is just too formulaic. It's not that the plots aren't a tad innovative - not just hostages at a bank but hostages in a airport control tower, a diner, and in this episode, a hospital operating room - it's just that the structure is just so formulaic and tedious. Guy with a gun takes over a place, the only two hostage negotiators in L.A. are called in, one of them calls the guy with the gun, things seem to be about to go well, then someone screws it up and this pisses off the guy with the gun and it makes everything harder for the FBI team. So they have to work harder to figure out what is motivating the guy, by going into his past (with the help of the cute girl with the Apple laptop back at HQ). That's pretty much what happens.

Yup, you're reading that right. The TV Guide Channel, which is mostly made up of interviews and behind the scenes visits to TV show sets and gossip, is going to have a marathon of the FOX drama Standoff this Sunday, from 3pm to 7pm. In case you're wondering, TV Guide is in the same company as FOX.

This is probably a good move, because the show has been interrupted for the past month or so because of baseball playoff and World Series coverage on FOX. So maybe this will get fans and potential fans into the show. Though I wonder if people will even find it on the TV Guide Channel.

[via TV Tattle]

(S01E04) I hate it when TV shows or movies are really "predictable" in how "unpredictable" they are. Case in point, tonight's Standoff. Have I just been watching too much television the past 40 years or were the two "twists" at the start of this episode pretty easy to guess? Yeah, it was kinda obvious that the first team assault on the house was just a training exercise, and it was equally obvious that the girl was in on the bank thefts with the serial bank robber, just wearing different wigs.

That's not to say that there are worse ways to kill an hour than watching Standoff. This was actually the best episode so far.

On the new FOX drama Standoff, Ron Livingston and Rosemarie DeWitt play Matt Flannery and Emily Lehman, who are partners on one of the FBI's finest crisis negotiaton teams. They also happen to be sleeping together. The show examines how the personal aspect of their relationship mixes in with the high-stakes nature of their jobs. I was able to get a few minutes with the pair before the screening of the show's pilot at the New York Television Festival. Of course, no Ron Livingston interview could go by without my sneaking in an Office Space question or two, which I did at the end:

(S01E03) There were two great things about this third episode of Standoff. One was a joke at the start of the show, when Matt says to Emily that he "feels like Lindsay Lohan," and Emily replies "oh come on, you're not that drunk." Matt was actually talking about everyone looking at him.

The second great thing about the episode was the commercial for a new Victoria's Secret bra. Something called the "Infinity Edge" bra. Awesome commercial. The rest of this episode? Meh.

After a rainy Friday night spent holed up in my apartment recapping the NYTVF events on Thursday, and a Saturday of rest, I was back at the Directors Guild Theater on Sunday for the festival's final two events: the awards ceremony and a screening of the FOX show Standoff.

I have to say, after all the craziness of the last week, the NYTVF folks did a good job of getting people in and out quickly. The award ceremony was only about a half-hour, and they decided to forego the red carpet for Standoff, thus keeping the rabid ranks of media and fans under control. It was probably just too exhausting to deal with for them, and I think they had the right idea. More info -- and pictures -- after the jump.

Last week I mentioned that Standoff was a lot like Bones. But after this episode, I'm wondering if it's not that Standoff is like Bones, it's more like FOX has a specific formula for the way they do dramas now.

That's not necessarily a bad thing. It's not a good thing either, but this episode is a vast improvement over the pilot, if only because the premise was meatier, a little less predictable, and it had some genuine tension.