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For those of you who've never seen Mad Men, AMC's critically acclaimed period drama set in the advertising industry in the sixties, there's a well-known scene in the first season. After protagonist Don Draper invites his boss Roger Sterling over for dinner and Sterling makes a drunken pass at Draper's wife Betty (which she politely rebuffs), Draper hatches a scheme to exact his revenge on Sterling. Immediately before an important client meeting, Draper treats Sterling to a boozy lunch of oysters and vodka, then pays off the lift operator in the company's office building to tell Sterling that the lift is out of order, forcing Sterling and Draper to walk up dozens of flights of stairs to their office. Being older and less fit than Draper and a chain-smoking alcoholic, Sterling is not prepared for this level of physical exertion, and by the time they reach the office he's so exhausted that he promptly projectile vomits on the floor, directly in front of the clients he's eager to impress.
HBO recently produced a 4K remaster of the entire series for their streaming platform HBO Max. Supposedly, something went wrong during the production of this remaster, resulting in numerous shots in which crew and equipment are visible when they should not be. And we're not talking about the reflection of a boom mic just visible in someone's glasses: in the scene described above, the crew members operating the vomit hose can be clearly seen kneeling behind the cast.
My first thought was "ha ha, how clumsy and incompetent can you get". My second thought, less than a minute later, was "I bet they did that on purpose to gin up free publicity". As Scott would say, it's bad on purpose to make you click.
I'm not the only one to have this thought, and I find it almost impossible to imagine how such a thing could be the result of an honest mistake. Consider how many pairs of eyes must have approved this thing before it was made available for streaming on HBO Max. Errors of this kind most commonly happen as a result of remastering a piece of visual media for an aspect ratio different from the one it was originally intended for: many 90s TV shows were filmed in widescreen with the intention to crop the image to a 4:3 aspect in post-production, and many directors and DPs paid very little attention to the content of the shots on the extreme left and right of the image, knowing that it would be cropped out before broadcast anyway. As a consequence, HD widescreen remasters of, for example, Friends usually make it painfully obvious when one of the actors has been replaced with a stand-in in a reverse shot. (In fairness to these directors and DPs, they had no way of knowing that 16:9 would eventually become the industry standard in televisions and other monitors, still less that anyone would have any interest in watching Friends two or three decades out from its original broadcast. How many 90s sitcoms are popular enough to warrant the HD remastering treatment? Even the idea of buying entire seasons of TV shows on VHS or DVD was unheard of at the time of Friends's original broadcast.) But that excuse obviously isn't applicable here: Mad Men was originally broadcast in a 16:9 aspect, and so is the 4K remaster. I don't know what this "remastering" consisted of: the cheap option is just to take the original video file and run it through an AI upscaling program, while the more expensive option is to redevelop the original negatives (the first three seasons of Mad Men were shot on film, before transitioning to digital for the rest of the show's run) with a higher resolution, drop the resulting video files into your NLE, then replicate the shot composition and edits of the original broadcast. This is a labour-intensive task, but not one that strikes me as especially prone to error: display the original broadcast on one monitor and the remaster on the other monitor. Copy the original's homework. It's not rocket science.
So, I surmise that HBO did this deliberately: they'll apologise for the "error" and promise that their editors are working around the clock to prepare amended video files with the errors fixed. Two weeks from now, these amended video files will be pushed to HBO Max. But of course, these "amended" video files will be the original video files approved and signed off on a year ago: most likely, they made the proper remaster first, then a bullshit version thereof with all of these incredibly blatant errors in.
And it occurs to me that just about every high-profile mishap in the entertainment industry over the last decade has been met with comparable accusations of having been deliberately staged for promotional reasons. When Steve Harvey announced the wrong winner of Miss Universe 2015, that was staged, or so the Internet thought. When Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced the wrong winner of the Oscar for Best Picture in 2017, that was staged. When Will Smith took the stage during the 2022 Oscars to slap Chris Rock across the face*, numerous people (including those in attendance) assumed that it was a pre-planned skit; nearly four years later, after Smith tendering his resignation from the Academy, receiving a formal ban from attending any Academy events and his film Emancipation being delayed owing to the negative publicity, I still routinely encounter people who are convinced the whole event was staged.
And I'm concerned about what this trend implies for political sense-making.
As established, I don't think the entertainment industry is above staging mistakes and blunders for the sake of a little cheap publicity. But this fact should not cause us to ignore a more fundamental truth: mistakes do happen. No one is immune from carelessness or errors. Even Homer sometimes nods. While remaining agnostic on whether the 2017 Oscars thing was staged or not, considering the amount of moving parts involved in a live event like this, someone reading out the wrong winner was bound to happen sooner or later, especially given the Academy's predilection for having the winners announced by established Hollywood lifers as a "passing-of-the-torch" gesture, people who by definition have poorer eyesight and are more prone to senior moments than younger people (when they made the erroneous announcement, Dunaway was in her late seventies, and Beatty in his eighties). Indeed, we should have a much higher prior on these mistakes being legitimate errors when they happen in live settings like award ceremonies, as compared to errors like HBO's (they could have uploaded the remaster to their servers whenever they pleased).
But there's a certain kind of person** who's extremely keen to claim that advertising doesn't work on him and he only buys products based on merit, and who can't stand the idea of falling for a publicity stunt which was disguised as something else — it makes him feel like a mark, no better than someone who eagerly replies to a 419 email. As such, whenever he encounters an event which seems to fit the broad contours of a disguised publicity stunt, he reflexively concludes that it must be, engaging in a lot of armchair theorising about how if it had been real then X would have happened, but because Y happened, it must have been staged. And a reflexive assumption that any apparent gaffe or blunder committed by any individual who works in the entertainment industry must have been deliberately, laboriously and painstakingly premeditated by the Powers that Be to garner clicks: I mean, it's not too much of a reach to see how this could push people into a more conspiratorial mode of thinking, is it? As Scott observed, it's "doing the very conspiracy-theory-ish thing of replacing a simple and direct picture of the world with a more complicated one without having enough evidence to justify such a move." A year and a half ago, Thomas Crooks shot Trump in the ear, and the attempt on his life was immediately met with accusations of Trump staging it as a publicity stunt. Compare the armchair theorising about the Will Smith slap ("A slow walk up, an open hand slap, no stagger, slow walk back with no scuffle and no security personnel stepping in? Feels absolutely staged for publicity") with the idle speculation about blood splatter packs concealed on Trump's person and how bullet wounds don't look like that (arguments usually made by people who proudly admit never to having handled or fired a gun in their lives) — I mean, they're not the same, but they certainly rhyme, don't they? Distrust of mainstream media narratives has traditionally been a right-coded phenomenon, but in the case of the attempt on Trump's life and the successful assassination of Charlie Kirk, it's been progressives who've been the most vocal in their disbelief of the official narrative (granted, many rightists, most prominently Candace Owens, also have alternative hypotheses about who's ultimately responsible for Charlie Kirk's death).
To head off one obvious objection: I don't think this trend is evidence of media consumers becoming more savvy and clued-in, less gullible, less prone to falling for state propaganda dressed up as objective, disinterested journalism. Rather, it's a toxic stew of motivated reasoning, Gell-Mann amnesia and isolated demands for rigour: we've all become postmodernists when it suits us, believing the mainstream narrative when it fits our worldview and jumping to paranoid, conspiratorial explanations when it doesn't. The BBC or the Washington Post are, at once, trustworthy outlets when we agree with them and establishment Pravdas when we don't. I don't think it's much of an exaggeration to say that any sufficiently politically active American of either stripe believes that American elections are simultaneously the most and least secure elections in the world, literally the dictionary definition of doublethink. As someone who believes that Biden was elected legitimately in 2020 and that Trump was elected legitimately in 2024, I find this intensely concerning. People will scoff at me and tell me that our brains didn't evolve to seek the truth but rather to help us survive and propagate and so it's silly to get so worked up about biases and motivated reasoning when these things are the water we fish swim in. But I don't care: I do not believe that it is psychologically healthy to hold two beliefs at the same time which on their face seem mutually exclusive and contradictory. It is not conducive to good mental health to simultaneously believe "The [2020/2024] (strike out as necessary) American presidential election was secure and legitimate, but the [2020/2024] (strike out as necessary) election was rigged and manipulated".
I don't like that HBO almost certainly included these "errors" in the Mad Men remaster deliberately. For people who fall for it, they'll think HBO are incompetent and careless, and I think it's profoundly unbecoming for someone to present themselves as stupider than they really are just to get attention (and hence revenue) in the short-term. I particularly don't like that HBO will probably blame their perfectly qualified editors for a decision made by the executives and/or marketing department. But for people who don't fall for it (like yours truly), it's providing additional evidence for the "major media companies are lying to you and the sheeple are falling for it hook, line and sinker" mindset. It's contributing, however indirectly, to the erosion of social trust, the assumption that we cannot accept what huge media conglomerates (and large corporations, by extension) say at face value. Per "Bounded Distrust", we expect companies to make technically-true-but-misleading claims about the qualities of their products. Historically, we did not expect companies to intentionally release substandard products as publicity stunts which they pass off as the result of human error, only to release the quality product after the fact. Now that's a new item added to the "buyer beware" list.
Wait — intentionally putting out a substandard product as a publicity stunt, just so you can pull it and replace it with the product you intended to sell all along. Is the Mad Men remaster just New Coke all over again?
*Not strictly a "mistake", as Smith intentionally struck Rock, but certainly an instance of a live entertainment event not going as the showrunners purportedly intended.
**People like us, really.
I've believed for a long time that conspiracy theories in general are a cope to deal with the fact the people who are in charge of our institutions are just people, like everyone else, and even when competent, they simply aren't capable of being perfect all the time. When there's universal agreement that things like presidential assassinations, mass shootings, and terrorist attacks shouldn't happen, and shouldn't be able to happen, it's oddly reassuring to blame them on the malevolence of a shady cadre of global elites because if this is the case, then the solution—getting rid of the malevolent actors—is simple. If instead such tragic events can happen despite competent, well-meaning, hard-working people doing their jobs, this lack of control makes things much scarier.
I don't want to dwell on dark subjects, so I'll go back to media remastering, which is about as low-stakes as you can get. For the past decade or so, I've made a habit of chasing down the best-sounding versions of audio recordings I want to add to my collection. In a rational world, this would mean simply finding the most recent releases, since one would normally expect that the continuing improvement of technology and best practices would yield increasingly superior results. Of course, you don't have to get too into the weeds to know about the "loudness wars" in CD (and now digital) mastering has hobbled sound quality since the late 90s, leading some to believe that the earlier versions when they didn't do this must be superior, but even then the answer is not always clear cut. And even going back to the original vinyl doesn't solve the problem. With any given release possibly having dozens of unique versions, finding the best one through trial and error would be expensive (especially if you're trying to get your paws on rare or foreign issues), and there are no quick and dirty rules you can follow.
The best resource for researching this is the Steve Hoffman forum, hosted by the namesake mastering engineer known for his high-quality audiophile issues. While Mr. Hoffman's warm, buttery sound is controversial, his forum attracts people from the industry, and there's a lot of inside baseball regarding the way things actually operate, a lot of it coming from Steve's own recollections. While things have changed in the recording world since the introduction of the compact disc and subsequent changeover to all-digital recording, an explanation of how the process worked in the vinyl era is instructive on the pitfalls of trying to remaster older recordings for CD.
Say an album is recorded in 1975. The band recorded that album to multitrack tape. Once the recording was finished, the engineers mixed the album down to a two-tack stereo tape, called the studio master, at which point their role in the process ended. But the tape still had to make it onto a vinyl record. The studio master, or a copy, would be sent to a mastering studio where this conversion was done. The limitations of the format required that bass be cut and treble boosted on the record according to a standardized formula, the end user's equipment reversing this process during playback (this is why a special phono preamp is required to use a record player with a stereo). The mastering engineer would also make other adjustments so that the recording would fit within vinyl's physical limitations and make large scale adjustments to ensure that all the tracks had similar volume, equalization, etc. This resulted in a "production master" which the mastering engineer would use to cut a wax "laquer" (more adjustments were made during this process; the art of cutting vinyl is mostly lost and most modern reissues sound like crap because of it), which was plated with metal and thus became a "mother". The mother was used as a mold to create "stampers", which were sent to pressing plants for the manufacture of the final disc. It should be noted that copies of the studio master would be sent to foreign labels or distribution arms in other countries, and these would create their own production masters and laquers for their domestic releases. Both the mothers and the stampers wore out with use, and popular albums would need to be cut again for reissues.
Fast forward ten years and you're a young mastering engineer who just got a job with Major Label. Both you and your employer are excited about the burgeoning digital revolution and they want you to put together a CD release of the 1975 album, which was very popular. Since compact disc doesn't require the same compromises that vinyl did, you want to use the studio master to ensure the best possible sound and as accurate a representation as possible of what the original engineer intended. You quickly realize, however, that this will be impossible, since the record was a British release and you're working for the American label that owns the rights to it, and with your deadline you don't have time to make inquiries to see if you can get the tape on loan. To make matters worse, a series of mergers and acquisitions in the past decade means that even at home, tapes have been stashed hither and yon and no one seems to have any idea about where everything is or even what anything is, since nothing is clearly marked with anything other than a track listing. Some tapes are nth generation copies that sound terrible, one was split up oddly for an 8-track release, one has interesting mastering choices that make it sound wholly different than any version you've ever heard, several are okay, several are Eq'd for vinyl and will require processing to make usable, and one has "DO NOT USE!" written on the box in magic marker.
Of course, the one with cautionary language was the best sounding by far, and in your time crunch, you don't have time to ask questions so you just ignore the warning and master the album without asking any questions. You find out later that this was indeed the copy that had been sent over from the UK, and it was marked Do Not Use because it wasn't a production copy with RIAA equalization and if it had been used to cut a lacquer it could have ruined an entire pressing. Six years later no-noise is invented and the label wants to release a "better" version that takes advantage of the new technology to eliminate the tiny amount of tape hiss audible on the CD issue you made. But by this time you've moved on and the engineer, in a time crunch, takes the warning literally and uses an inferior copy that requires him to crank the noise reduction up to 11, absolutely killing the recording. Your original remaster was fine, and any benefits of additional noise reduction would have been dubious at best, but this new improved version supersedes the old one and is now the only thing available in the US market. Then ten years after that the British label decides to do a global deluxe edition touting that it was "from the original master tapes", which was true, except by now the loudness wars are in full swing and the whole thing is compresses to shit.
Meanwhile, back in 1986 the British label exec decided that the CDs should sound as close to the original albums as possible, and specified that the production masters should be used. The Dutch couldn't find their own tapes, so they requested the master tapes from the British label, and were given the actual master tapes for their 1989 domestic release, which is clearly superior to every other available release, but they started using the US mastering 2 years later. So now you're looking to buy the CD and you're confronted with a bevy of options. The 2002 global release is available in any store but sounds harsh and overcompressed. It's an ear-bleeder. The 1991 US version is readily available on the used market but sounds even worse. The old British version is easily available and sounds okay but not great. The original US version is kind of hard to find and sounds better than the British version but still has its problems. And the 1989 Dutch version is obviously the best, but it was only in production for 2 years and used copies go for top dollar.
The point of all of this is that no one intended for there to be a whole bevy of crappy releases. Record companies had discovered a gold mine in reselling albums their customers had already bought, and to do so they had to tout some improvement over the previous sound. So they latched on to anything they could find that was technically true, regardless of whether it was the best possible version or even an improvement over the original vinyl. I highly doubt the Mad Men errors were part of a cynical ploy to drum up publicity through a fuck up, because I don't see what they have to gain. The show is from 2007 so it's not like anything is going to require a great deal of restoration. The whole 4k thing is a marketing gimmick because the benefits over 1080p are dubious to begin with on most televisions, and are completely obviated by whatever lossy compression algorithm they're using. As long as it's technically in 4k they haven't lied, and the goal is to get the product out as cheaply and quickly as possible. They probably sent out the wrong files to production, or raw, unedited files, and asked for a conversion into 4k, and didn't bother to verify anything. This isn't a restoration that's done frame by frame but a combination of computer upscaling and rescanning film at higher resolution. They weren't paying anyone to pick over all 100 hours or whatever with a fine-toothed comb.
So there were obvious mistakes, but they'll be fixed in a week, and nobody will care or even remember after that. I certainly don't think a significant number of people are going to subscribe to HBO Max now because they didn't know about the 4k version of Mad Men, at least not enough to doubling production costs.
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