One of my favorite shows right now is “Mad Men,” a serial drama about an advertising agency in the early 1960s. Although the characters and lighting are great, one of the things I enjoy the most is the insane attention to detail paid to props and set dressing. With that in mind, I was a bit dismayed reading Mark Simonson’s teardown of the typography of the show. According to Simonson, there are several anachronistic uses of type in the show. Reading his piece, however, I wondered how the producers could avoid these anachronisms, short of hiring a dramaturge or production designer as fastidious as Simonson. He ends the piece saying, “I don’t mean to be so hard on Mad Men. I dearly love this show,” which confirms that historical consistency is really hard to do.

Over on Matt Haughey’s PVRblog, a post on The Daily Show and their TiVos drew a comment from a former Daily Show researcher about the array of devices used to capture clips for the program. John Teti says, “it’s literally 15 rack-mounted TiVos of various models, many from the pre-Series 2 era.” It sounds like it’s baling wire and duct tape: they don’t even have capacity for archiving. The whole comment is certainly worth reading, as is the New York Times story that spawned the conversation.

If this had been a real show when I was in high school, I totally would have watched it.

There are many things I would like to see on TV, but this is not one of them: Watts launches African-American channel – Politico.com

JC Watts represented Norman, OK in the US House when I was in college at OU. He was a former OU football star and a Republican. If I remember correctly, the local NAACP protested his fund-raisers.

I’m not up on all the various online video providers out there, but I found complete episodes of Fox’s version of The Ben Stiller Show on Truveo, which appears to be an AOL subsidiary. Here’s Episode #102, which features some amusing garden tool commercials.