Free Promotion for Two of My Favourite Shows

I do not feel particularly up to a blog entry tonight, so I thought instead I would provide two of my favourite shows with a bit of free promotion.

For those of you who have not seen it yet, you might want to catch up with the first two seasons of the series Mad Men on DVD. The series is set in the fictional advertising Sterling Cooper in the Sixties, generally considered the Golden Age of Advertising. Besides a great cast and great writers, what makes Mad Men such a great series is that that the characters behave as they would in the early Sixties. They smoke. They drink. They're sexists. Unlike many period pieces, no effort is made to have them behave as if they were from the Naughts. The show also has almost no anachronisms--I think in its entire run I have only counted maybe three or four, if that.

Currently, AMC has a web site set up where you can "Mad Men yourself"--that is, create your own Mad Men character. You can access it here. In expectation of the coming third season, Hitflix has a first look at Mad Men season three in the form of a photographic gallery. You can access it here (in the giving credit where credit is due, I learned of this from Reel Fanatic. Mad Men returns to AMC on August 16.

Another one of my favourite shows currently on the air is Leverage, whose second season is airing right now on TNT on Wednesday nights at 8:00 Central. Leverage centres on a team of former con artists, thieves, and hackers, banded together by a former insurance investigator, to right corporate and government wrongs against ordinary people. The show owes a lot to movies like Topkapi and Ocean's Eleven, so that each episode unfolds like a good caper movie. Leverage benefits from a great cast and some very smart writing.

Right now Leverage has a rather cute promotion where you can get the Leverage team to con your friends. I pulled a con on myself, which you can see here. Anyway, if you want to con your friends, you can do so here.

Good night and good luck, everyone!