Innocent Bystander

Mad Men Redux: Zou Bisou Bisou Revealed...Now With Megan's Version Added!

Leave it to my actor pal Angela to dig up this YouTube video revealing the secret origin of the song Megan (Jessica Paré) sang to Don on his birthday last night on Mad Men. Of course, it helps if you have a basic understanding of French and know that my extremely phonetic spelling of "Zubie-Zubie-Zu" was dead wrong...it's Zou Bisou Bisou (Bisou means kiss, not sure what Zou means). As the person who commented on the YouTube page mentioned, "This video is about to become very suddenly popular."

The original singer, Gillian Hills, has a very slick if enigmatic "official" website for someone who was born in 1944. She's on Wikipedia and in IMDb. This seems kind of "manufactured to me"...but maybe that's just my suspicious nature. That "music video," done in a time when they didn't really exist, just seems kind of fishy to me...but I guess she's the real thing.

 

And here's Megan's version from Mad Men (yes, she lip-synched), which judging by the shaky camera-work is recorded off a TV set, so it might not be on YouTube for very long...enjoy it while you can, in all it's leggy glory!

 

Ten Things I Learned from the Return of Mad Men...

Mad Men returned for its fifth season, after an absence of 17 months. The 2-hour premiere episode was a bit odd, possibly because I'm used to more intense, faster-paced TV shows, such as Justified, Breaking Bad, Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and Betty White: Off Their Rockers. The pacing of Mad Men has always been glacial--it's one of the show's charms, but definitely an acquired taste. Nonetheless, I did learn some things from the season premiere.

1. It's summer of 1966...Memorial Day weekend and June 1 to be exact. So about 9 months have passed in Mad Men time since last we saw these people.

2. June 1 is Don Draper's birthday. He's a Gemini. However, June 1 is NOT Dick Whitman's birthday--that was months earlier--but in a lot of ways he's still a Gemini.

3. Megan, Don's new wife, knows about Dick Whitman.

4. Megan is f*cking hot.

5. Joan had her baby. Her husband is due back from Viet Nam to continue his tour of duty at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Joan and her mother do NOT get along.

6. If you know of a sexier scene on cable TV than the final scene between Don and Megan while she "cleans the apartment," send me links, please.

7. Whither January Jones? Other than two or three seconds in the recap before the show began, Betty Draper Francis was nowhere to be seen, including in the preview for next week, where she was decidedly edited around. The official excuse is she was pregnant in real life. I am skeptical of this...not the pregnancy, but the excuse. I think it's because of  her wooden performance as Emma Frost in X-Men: First Class, something most of the English-speaking world can never forgive.

8. Peggy knows Don better than Megan does.

9. Megan is f*cking hot.

10. Ladies, you have two and a half months to learn that "Zou Bisou Bisou" song for MY birthday. Don't forget the fishnets.

 

 

 

It's a great time to watch TV...

I know, I know...spring is the air and we should all be spending more time outdoors. But screw that. TV, at least cable TV is better than ever.

The Walking Dead has had a much better second half of its season than the first. Two major characters have bitten the zombie dust, and I couldn't be happier, since I found both of them incredibly annoying as both characters and actors. One of them shouldn't be a surprise to those of us who read Robert Kirkman's comic book series. We knew that one was coming eventually, but they did put a somewhat different twist (pun intended) on it. And the second killing (which happened first, last week on the series) probably puts to rest the question of which cast member wanted to be released from his/her contract after Frank Darabont left the series. I'm still not entirely sold on this series, though. I find most of the actors annoying and the continual shock value of the zombie killings is so over the top at times that it can only be done for that reason.

But when The Walking Dead goes away next weekend, Mad Men comes back (on March 25), and with a 2-hour premiere episode. MM has been gone for over 17 months, and everything points to a major comeback at this point. It's getting a crazy amount of press, even in my little 2 weekly magazine subscriptions world (major articles in both New York and Entertainment Weekly). And while mum is the word on anything--including how much of a time jump the series has this time--I'm very excited about its return.

I am a recent convert to Game of Thrones, having watched the entire first season last weekend in one long orgy of viewing. I can't believe what an incredibly beautiful-looking series this is and how much I succumbed to its charm. I'm categorically NOT a fantasy person, but it reminds me a lot of Deadwood, believe it or not. Once you remove the setting, it's just another fascinating and compelling character study, just with swords and maybe a dragon or three as opposed to Deadwood's guns, horse sh*t and swear words. As for DW, I'm three shows away from finishing the series. I'm finding the final season (season 3) a bit tedious, but I'm in it until the end. And since Justified seems to be a reunion show for star Timothy Olyphant and numerous other Deadwood alumni, I think we should start a grass roots effort to get Ian McShane as the main big bad in next year's season 4 of Justified (it was renewed last week). Speaking of which, this season of Justified (which is about half over as of this writing) is another great one, with Olyphant's Raylan Givens angrier than ever and hurtling headlong to a killer confrontation with Robert Quarles (Neil McDonough).

Finally, along with the return of Mad Men on AMC, The Killing also comes back on April 1. That's an extremely appropriate day for the show that fooled us all--and NOT in a good way--last year. Despite excellent performances, The Killing dragged on and on for me, no doubt compounded by the dreary Seattle weather portrayed in the show and the hang-dog expression of its lead, Mirielle Enos. And then they didn't even resolve the main storyline! I'm giving The Killing a one-show reprieve, and if it doesn't come through in the first episode, I'm killing it, with no doubt left in your mind, a refreshing point of view I wish the producers would adopt. Stay tuned.

Justified: 10 Pounds of Story in a 5-Pound Sack...

I'm having a little bit of a problem with Justified this season. It's on its fifth episode, which aired last night, and while I'm enjoying the season so far, it's not near as well-paced as last year. I think the problem is they have 10 pounds of story in a 5-pound show. Or more correctly in the Harlan County milieu, 50 Oxycontin pills in a 25-pill container.

There's just too much going on. We have dual (or dueling, eventually, I image) new villains in this season's story, Mykelti Williamson's Limehouse, the banker of choice for Harlan County criminals, and Dixie Mafia chief Neil McDonough as Quarles. And that's on top of returning bad guy Dickie Bennett (Jeremy Davies) and uber-villain Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), who is definitely playing on the dark side's team this year. Last week there was an episode so crowded with new people that Ava, Winona, Art, Arlo, and Tim never even stuck their heads out to see their shadows. (Devil, unfortunately did.)

Last night the show borrowed a page from the new Elmore Leonard book, Raylan. It concerned the theft and possible resale of a person's organs, in particular Dewey Crowe's kidneys. The plot introduced a new character, a comely transplant nurse, Layla (played by Maggie Lawson of Psych fame) who flirted with and fired upon Raylan. And while the show was great, as usual, the amount of screen time given to Layla made her feel like a total throwaway character. She was on, she was gone. Lawson and Olyphant had great chemistry, too, so here's hoping she appears again (ditto for Carla Cugino as Karen Sisco...er, Goodall).

Beyond the Limehouse and Quarles subplots, Jere Burns is still lurking around the fringes as Win Duffy; Winona is pregnant with Raylan's child but has evidently flown the coop (at least it looked that way at the end of the episode), and Dickie is still...well, Dickie. He'd just as soon kill you as make you laugh. There's the spectre of Mags Bennett, left over from last season, with her money in Limehouse's hands and everybody--Dickie, Boyd, even young Loretta--wanting it. And the mystery of where it all went (or still is). It's a lot of story in a one-hour (well...44-minute) show. And I find myself wishing they'd slow down a bit and let things unfold at a less dense pace.

There's another small problem I have with this season: The humor. I know that Elmore Leonard's world of cops and robbers often portrays the lighter side of these characters. You can't accurately adapt Leonard without showing all the quirkiness he places in some of these people. But Justified is a little too broad this year. There's also a little too much of Raylan's stories (about his aunt defending her home from people looking for someone and of his mom running away from Arlo and hiding out in Limehouse's holler). These stories have pertinence to what is going on, but the downhome delivery reminds me sometimes of Dan Rather's rather annoying homilies when he was anchoring the CBS Evening News, especially on election night.

Still, don't get me wrong: Justified is the best show on TV right now. It has the most well-crafted characters and the writers know how to pace a story and let it play out throughout the course of a 13-episode season.

I'm currently watching all three seasons of Deadwood for the very first time (I'm on episode three of season two right now), and it's easy to draw an historical through-line from Olyphant's Marshal Seth Bullock straight down to Marshall Raylan Givens. Maybe Raylan is his great, great grandson or some such. Either way, he's still--as Winona put it in the very first episode of Justified--the angriest man I know.

Good luck, Chuck...

Chuck, the TV series, ended with a bang tonight. After three great seasons (1-3), and one mostly forgettable one (season 4), the series was given another in a long list of cancellation reprieves by NBC for season 5, in what seemed to be a placeholder position on Friday nights while the floundering network hoped and prayed for some kind of replacement show that would at least better Chuck's ratings. (Note to NBC execs: the show about the stars tracing their family trees isn't it.)

The truth of the matter is, Chuck had a perfect ending when season 3 stopped. If the show would have ended right then and there, it would have been a classic. Chuck Bartowski had fulfilled everything: He got the girl, he became a spy, he escaped his failed past. But NBC listened to the fans of the series and brought it back for a fourth season, a season mired by even more stunt casting (always a problem with this show, although a few moments shine through, like Scott Bakula as Chuck's father), and an over-dependence on product placement (I'm looking at you, Subway) that bordered on the obnoxious. (Yes, fans buying Subway sandwiches saved the show at least once, I get it.)

The fifth season, which NBC said upfront was 13 episodes and done, redeemed the show slightly. The final two episodes, with Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski) going rogue and forgetting all her memories of her relationship with Chuck (Zachary Levi) were great. But the season was once again mired by stunt casting (an unrecognizable Mark Hamill in the first episode, the imminently forgettable Angus Macfadyen as the big bad in the final episodes, and Matrix refugee Carrie-Anne Moss still milking that whole black leather thing from her only hit film). By season five most of the regular characters had gotten tired: Big Mike, Jeff and Lester, Morgan, Ellie and Awesome, had all become TV show cardboard cutouts, more annoying than enjoyable. Worst of all, star Zach Levi seemed to phone the show in during some episodes, and it remained for Yvonne Stahovski to put on a cat-suit to wake me back up. (Seriously: I would SO watch a Sarah Walker show with her as a CIA agent.)

I'd like to say all is forgiven, Chuck, but that's clearly not the case as far as I'm concerned. Despite an open-ended ending that was ambiguous enough to be really appealing, the failure to abort at the right time made you fail your 5-year spy mission. Better to have gone off to TV heaven back at the end of season 3 when you had a natural, (dare I say it?) AWESOME ending, then to stretch this out for two more seasons.

But still, the real story of Chuck began with a kiss...and the series ended with a kiss, too. There's a certain symmetry to that which I find kind of special. So good luck, Chuck. We'll always have those first 50 or so shows when you were simply wonderful.

Justified: Hello, Karen!

If you missed the first wham-bam-thank-you-m'am episode of the third season of Justified, you missed a doozy. I won't reveal too much here other than this: ice pick, prison, Dickie, rotting weed, the return of Jere Burns, a new ruthless villain, the above-mentioned "wham-bam," and watch out for that frying pan. It picked up just where season 2 left off and I couldn't be happier.

When episode 2 premieres tonight at 10:00 on FX, a mysterious fellow marshal from Raylan's past comes to Lexington. She's played by Carla Cugino and her name is Karen Goodall, but you may know her better as another of Elmore Leonard's memorable literary characters, Karen Sisco. First played by Jennifer Lopez--in her only watchable role--in the movie Out of Sight, Gugino starred as the character in a short-lived (10 episodes) series on ABC in 2003-2004. And while the producers of Justified are being cagey, and not admitting that it's the same Karen, we all know it is. And even if it isn't, I'm going to say it is. She just got married sometime in the past few years...

Leonard's new book, Raylan, also debuted last week on what we call around these parts "Justified Tuesday." I bought the e-book version, but looking through the actual printed book last week, it's slim to say the least, more of a novella. I'm uncertain of the history of this project. It contains characters we're familiar with from the TV series, including Dickie and Coover Bennett, but as Dickie and Coover Pervis. Their father--not their mother, Mags--is the pot king of Harlan County. And Loretta and her dad, the doomed Walt McCready, also make an appearance, so it's a bit fuzzy as to what came first: season 2 of Justified or Leonard's book. I'm guessing the latter and the producers of the TV show got an advance look, since there are scenes in it that are right out of the show.

I must confess to loving Elmore Leonard's work when it's done right on film or TV. The aforementioned Out of Sight--along with Get Shorty--are two of my favorite movies. Justified is great, as was Karen Sisco, and I enjoyed Beau Bridges years ago (1998)--also on ABC, which seems to greenlight Leonard series only to kill them quickly--as Maximum Bob. But I've always had a hard time trying to read the original novels by Leonard. I tried with both Out of Sight and Get Shorty, thinking I'd have an edge there since I liked the (mostly-faithful, from what I know) adaptations. No go, tho. I'm having a bit of a hard time with the Raylan book, too. There's just something about Leonard's use of dialogue to mainly advance the story that gets me. But I love the characters from the TV show so much that it's an interesting-enough read, even though it seems to take place in an alternate universe. And any window into the adventures of US Marshal Raylan Givens is a welcome one to escape through at any time.

Justified: A little hero worship, please...

My favorite show, Justified, returns to FX for its third season two weeks from today, on Tuesday, January 17. In fact, that date is a banner day in the history of deputy US Marshal Raylan Givens. Not only does season 3 debut at 10:00pm, but a new Elmore Leonard book, Raylan, comes out, too. There's also a new e-book version of Leonard's first Raylan Givens stories, Fire in the Hole, available now for only $1.99 on Amazon, for you Kindle and iPad readers. And if you're lucky enough to live in the Los Angeles area, you can go see Leonard, series creator Graham Yost and star Timothy Olyphant speak at the Writers Bloc at 7:30pm. I'm tempted to drive up myself, except then I wouldn't be back in time to watch the season premiere. (Oops...it's sold out anyway. Nevermind!)

While Breaking Bad is probably the best show on TV right now, I think Justified is my own personal fave, if only because it's more fun, and a tad less stressful (let's face it...root canal without novacaine is a tad less stressful than Breaking Bad). Givens is a wonderful character, surrounded by a cast of characters with as much kick as Kentucky moonshine. There's his boss, Art Mullen, played by the great Nick Searcy; ex-girlfriend Ava Crowder (Joelle Carter), who wasn't looking so good last time we saw her; friend/foe Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), who deserves his own show; fellow marshals Rachel Brooks (Erica Tazel) and Tim Gunnerson (Jacob Pitts), neither of which were given much to do last season (I take that back...Tim had a pivotal role in the very last episode); his criminal father, Arlo Givens (Raymond J. Barry in the role of his career); and the sexiest woman on television (for me, at least), Raylan's ex-wife (and current squeeze), Winona Hawkins (Natalie Zea). 

Coming off an extraordinary season (now available on DVD and Blu-ray) that chronicled the tale of the Bennett clan (which won Margo Martindale an Emmy for Best Supporting Actress for her portrayal of Mags Bennett, the matriarch of the family), it's difficult to see how they're going to top that memorable run of episodes. This season sports not one, but two new villains: Neal McDonough and Mykelti Williamson. Whether this duo will be as memorable as Mags and her three sons (including Dickie, played by Lost alumnus Jeremey Davies in a role as different from his Daniel Farraday character as humanly possible). Either way, I know I'm there for this. You should be, too.

Here's a short preview:

 

The new fall TV season: is it "meh" or "blah"...I can't decide.

We're close to a month into the new fall TV season and I have to say, it's pretty sucky. Yes, I know that's a highly technical term, and I apologize to anyone reading this for using such advanced terminology, but I call them as I sees them.

There were a number of new--and returning--shows I decided to watch or was looking forward to seeing again. At this point--I'm either happy or sad to say--I've pretty much dropped all the new ones I decided to try. That speaks volumes either to the quality of those shows or my dwindling attention span.

Of all the new shows, the one I was most looking forward to was Person of Interest, the JJ Abrams/Jonathan Nolan collaboration featuring actors Jim Caviezel and Michael Emerson teaming up to fight crime in New York City with the aid of Emmerson's post-9/11 super computer. The good news is it's filmed in NYC, and it neatly captures the post-9/11  surveillance, closed circuit TV, and other assorted changes in city life since that horrible day. The bad news: It's kind of boring. Caviezel is about as exciting as burnt toast, Emerson does this very actorly limp that is supposed to give his character some kind of damaged depth, and co-star Taraji P. Henson is the most unconvincing police detective EVER. No one seems to get that this is a "new millennium" version of the classic The Equalizer, and as such, should neatly sum up the paranoia of everyday city life. It fails miserably at that, with a "person in distress" weekly plotline and a much too slow unveiling of  the two main characters' backstories. I gave up on this show halfway through the last episode, when it was revealed the "damsel in distress" was really the person doing the bad stuff, a plotline they recycled from an earlier show. Yes, four shows in and they're recycling already. Yeesh (there I go using highly technical terms again).

I was also looking forward to New Girl, starring the lovely Zooey Deschannel. Three shows into that, I gave up. Deschannel is lovely and quirky and different, but I got to the point where I wanted to slap her for all those things. The guys she lives with are all blatant stereotypes, including the em0/sensitive guy (who you just know will end up being in love with Zooey and they will live happily ever after) and the douchebag guy. New becomes old really fast in this day and age.

Whitney Cummings was the "It Girl" there for a short period of time. With two new shows on the networks this year--2 Broke Girls and Whitney, her own "sitcom"--Cummings breezed in out of nowhere (for me, at least) to suddenly dominate prime-time. The good news: 2 Broke Girls is cute and funny, if a little too much a female version of Two and A Half Men, especially when it comes to how far can you go to be dirty on network TV, at least dialogue wise. It coasts along with the very appealing Kat Dennings and Beth Behrs and is refreshingly Whitney-free. I wish I could say the same for Whitney, which is about as funny as pay toilet in a diarrhea ward (I doubt they've ever had diarrhea wards in hospitals, but that joke from a 10-year-old perfectly illustrates the kind of "sophisticated" humor present on Whitney). My advice to NBC: Change the name of the show to Skanky. It fits better.

American Horror Story is Glee creator Ryan Murphy's new FX show. It's gotten a lot of press (Entertainment Weekly seems to LOOOOOOVE it, for some reason) and I'm at a loss for why. I watched the first episode and gave up. The creators and the netlet owe Stephen King a royalty payment: The show is nothing but a rip-off of The Shining, with an evil-infected house in Los Angeles subbing for the evil-infected hotel in Colorado, and a bit more sex added in. I totally forgot to watch episode 2 and by the time episode 3 aired last night, I was over it.

As for returning shows, I'm sad to say that The Office without Steve Carrel is like AfterMASH without Alan Alda: uninspired, unfunny, and just kind of sad. It's time to close down Dunder-Mifflin, I'm afraid. The Walking Dead grew from six episodes last season to 13 this one, and if the first extended (90 minutes) episode is any indication, that was a major mistake. The cast spent just about the entire show looking for a missing kid in the woods. It was a long and boring search, and a metaphor for what I was experiencing while watching. Both the actors and me where asking the same question: When the F is something going to happen? Turns out zombie killing gets real old real fast, and I actually think the show jumped the shark when Rick and Daryl cut open a dead zombie to find out if the missing girl was in its stomach. It was a long, gross sequence done solely for the gross-out factor, with much head-turning, eye-rolling, and disgusted looks from the actors involved. Don't worry...I'm pretty sure all the viewers felt that way, too.

And finally there's the new--improved?--Two and A Half Men with Ashton Kutcher. I've never been a fan of Ashton and find him pretty much as bewildering, appeal-wise, as Jennifer Lopez. As software billionaire Walden Schmidt, Kutcher is a bit like the dead Charlie Harper (Charlie Sheen) and a bit not so much. He's a naive chick magnet on his own for the first time, having been booted out by his wife (the wonderful and horribly underused Judy Greer). He's taken over the Malibu house with Alan (Jon Cryer) and Jake (Angus T. Jones) still in residence. Each subsequent show seems to offer diminishing returns, both for the viewer and in the ratings. Supposedly in real life, Demi Moore has kicked Ashton out of the house. I think I'm about to do the same. This show would have been so much better if Hugh Grant had signed on. I will admit though that Cryer is one of the funniest and most talented actors on TV today. Give him his own show!

Okay, HBO...I give in...

After a lifetime of resistance, I finally gave in this weekend and ordered HBO. And when I say lifetime, I MEAN lifetime. I was still living in Tamaqua, PA when HBO was first broadcast in eastern Pennsylvania (Wilkes Barre, to be exact, on Nov. 8, 1972). For years my standard joke was "I can only watch Sharky's Machine so many times," a reference to a ubiquitous Burt Reynold's movie that seemed to be on the pay-channel every night back in the 1980s, the last time I had HBO for any length of time.

I grew up in a time when drive-in theaters regularly ran "public service announcements" (as seen here) against pay TV. We had cable TV in my household as early as 1962, and when HBO started, my parents actually sprung for it, at least for a little while. I resisted it pretty much ever since, even when the channel started to offer new programming such as The Sopranos. I resisted it through the True Blood years (I'd rather watch toast turn cold than Anna Paquin in anything...have you seen Blue State?). But a couple of weekends ago, they had a (largely unadvertised) free weekend, which coincided with the second season premiere of Boardwalk Empire. During that weekend they reran all the episodes of season one of BE, and I was smart enough to record them all.

Let's backtrack a year, to the last time I caught a free weekend of HBO. It was when Boardwalk Empire premiered, and I watched the first episode. Despite the fact that it took place in the almost-mythical land of Atlantic City--where many a summer vacation was enjoyed by yours truly--I wasn't sold on it. I couldn't buy Steve Buscemi as Nucky Thompson, the Atlantic County treasurer (actual name: Nucky Johnson), who ruled the City in the 1920s through the 1940s, with an iron fist. Buscemi is a fine actor, but he's someone who is always Steve Buscemi. Only the clothes and situation changes on and around him. I also didn't like Michael Pitt, who plays World War I hero Jimmy Darmody, Nucky's surrogate son. And when you have problems with the two main leads, you have a problem with the show.

But something clicked this time, and after watching the first 3 or 4 episodes of season one, I was hooked. The meager set--which is quite well done, but limits the boardwalk action as much as Tim Burton's Gotham City set in Batman limited the action there--has grown on me, supplemented by a lot of green screen work to add to the less than a block of actually built boardwalk. The set ia an amalgamation of long-gone AC landmarks (including the Marlborough-Blenheim hotel), and some of the green screen work includes the Traymore and other hotels and piers.

The real star of the show--for me, at least--is the luminous Kelly Macdonald, who plays Nucky's far from usual type squeeze, Margaret Schroeder. I first fell for Macdonald in the BBC miniseries, State of Grace, then loved her in the movie The Girl in the Cafe. She's done some American movie work--including No Country for Old Men, as Josh Brolin's wife--but here she's allowed to utilize her lilting Irish accent to full effect (for the record, she was born in Scotland). And she's wonderful in it, playing a woman far ahead of her time who is equally adept at providing for her family while trying to be on as equal ground as possible with her male counterparts. Mrs. Schroeder is a plain-speaking, honest, immigrant woman who has seen a lifetime of tragedy already, and who now lives with the man--Nucky Thompson--who ordered her husband's death.

Boardwalk Empire touches on a lot of things that are all but lost in American history: Prohibition (catch Ken Burns's excellent recent PBS miniseries on that, too), the parade of lost souls who came back from WWI damaged beyond repair (Jack Huston's spooky portrayal of Richard Harrow, the vet with half a face), even the incubator babies that were an "attraction" on AC's boardwalk for many years. It mixes fact with fiction: Thompson and Dermody hob-knob with Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and Arnold Rothstein, to name a few prominent 1920s-era gangsters, while some AC politicos (including Nucky) have their names changed to protect the innocent (there's a Mayor Bader, who is the namesake of the AC airport, for example).

So here's to Boardwalk Empire and Steve Buscemi for getting me to spring for the extra 14 bucks a month to watch their most excellent show for the coming 10 weeks or so. Not even bare breasts, Burt Reynolds, and the opportunity to watch the same movie 30 times in one month, were able to accomplish that in the past.

The Hour on BBC America...

My on-screen TV program guide reduces the new BBC America show, The Hour, to a three-word synopsis: "Current affairs show." That makes it sound like something that used to show up on Sunday morning local TV, when the FCC required--and maybe still does--so many hours of local programming per week. (These days, that requirement--if still standing--is probably filled with endless hours of repetitious newscasts, narrated by repetitious anchors. I swear to God they clone them.)

But The Hour isn't that at all. It's a new drama--part of BBC America's ridiculously titled "Dramaville" (they're big on these programming titles: "Supernatural Saturday," "Ministry of Laughs"), that takes place in 1956 Britain, at--of all places--the BBC itself. Part journalism story, part Cold War thriller, part romance, the show will have inevitable comparisons to this side of the pond's Mad Men. Everyone smokes, women are trying to change their lot in life in the men's world of careers, the devilishly handsome Dominic West reminds one of Jon Hamm, and everyone smokes. Oh, I mentioned that? Well, it's worth mentioning twice.

Freddie Lyon (Ben Whishaw) plays the genius TV guy who envisions a whole new kind of news show for the Beeb, one that ditches the newsreel format for edgier, live news. His partner in crime--and love interest, if one-sided (at the moment)--Bel Rowley (Romola Garai, very reminiscent of Kate Winslett) has impressed her BBC bosses enough to garner the producer job at the new show, but Freddie is viewed as too much of a loose cannon, plus he wants to "present," meaning be on the air. That slot is already filled by Hector Madden (Dominic West), who already has his eyes on the shapely Miss Rowley (they called them "Miss" back then, folks), even though he's married, and his father-in-law may have had a hand in his newest job placement. And into all of this hub-bub of the start-up of a new show comes a murder mystery, one which involves the reluctant Freddie, urged on by an old friend to investigate a murder MI6 is putting the hush-hush to, and one which may have its roots in the Cold War, during a time when it when it was at its chilliest, the late 1950s. (It's very cool to see Torchwood's Burn Gorman playing a mystery man who may or may not be a British spy.)

The Hour is stylish, fascinating and evocative. Yeah, it has its roots in Mad Men, that comparison has to be acknowledged. No new show that takes place in the middle of the 20th century, including the upcoming The Playboy Club on NBC and Pan Am on ABC (excuse me...it's more correctly known as the breathless network announcer calls it: "ABC's Pan Am on ABC"...what network was that again, please?) can escape that, no matter what people like director Thomas Schlamme say of the latter. No network executive ever said "Get me a show set in the '60s!" before Mad Men became such Emmy-bait. Whatever its point of origin, The Hour is throughly enjoyable, and its upcoming stablemates in "Dramaville"--Luther (starring Idris Elba as a damaged detective), Whitechapel (about a series of Jack the Ripper-like murders in modern day London), and the excellent State of Play (the original BBC mini-series mixing journalism, murder, and politics and the basis for the so-so American movie starring Russell Crowe)--all look like winners, too. "Dramaville" promises to be "the home for groundbreaking British drama," and so far, with this one show, it's living up to its boast.