Mad Men is probably one of the best 10 television shows ever made. It’s certainly one of the most important. It came to define a late aughts “golden age” of TV when the internet was full of show recaps and essays and aspiring networks were racing to land prestige TV hits that would win awards and convince critics that movies were no longer the most important medium for visual storytelling. So it’s equally fitting, in a way, that 4K re-release of Mad Men on HBO includes sloppy oversights that make it emblematic of media’s current enshitification in the streaming era.
The ultra-HD makeover of AMC’s period drama about an advertising agency straddling the cultural revolution of 60s became available on HBO Max on December 1 and it includes some unique artistic choices. The most viral of those is leaving in the barf machine for one of the series’ most memorable moments. In season 1, episode 7, “Red in the Face,” Don Draper suckers his boss, Roger Sterling, into a late lunch break filled with booze and oysters and then races him up the Manhattan high-rise stairs when the elevator goes out of commission.
Sterling gets back to the office just in time to puke in front of the entire agency, including important clients. It’s an important moment that underlines a bunch of conflicting fault lines within their relationship. It’s also very gross. In the new 4K version, viewers are treated to the actual puke machine that hurls clam chowder out a pipe next to Sterling’s face, as well as the stage hands deploying it. It’s beautifully absurd and also kind of undercuts the entire scene.
the new 4K transfer of mad men on HBO somehow does not have any of the post-production edits added in, which means you get stuff like this where you can see the crew member manning the puke machine after Roger has too many oysters lmao pic.twitter.com/HNgPRNOsla
— johnny (@bigrackspart7) December 2, 2025
“This is hilarious, and the extra hand on the crew member’s shoulder is killing me,” wrote one commenter on Reddit. “Like someone else is giving him extra emotional support while he shoots fake vomit from a tube.” We’ve seen this sort of thing happen before, but it’s usually when older shows get updated to newer aspect ratios and stuff that wasn’t originally intended to be part of the scene makes it into the frame.
The fact that the apparatus and its handlers weren’t scrubbed out in post-production, as they were for the original version of the show, raises bigger questions about just how carefully HBO handled the re-release of one of modern TV’s most storied series. What kind of penny-pinching apathy lets the barf machine skate through the review process unscathed, and in the first season no less?
I casually started re-watching while doing other stuff just a couple weeks ago and made it through the first two seasons in no time. Who at Warner Bros. Discovery thought it was a good idea to bring Mad Men back to a major streaming platform for the first time since it left Netflix back in 2020 and not skim it for issues? Especially since it was being upscaled to 4K? If they didn’t even catch the barf machine, what else did they miss?
Well, the episode order for one. At least some users, including myself, tried to watch season 1, episode 7 only to find that it had swapped places with episode 6, which had swapped places with episode 5. I guess David Zaslav didn’t want to pay someone’s nephew to sit in a room and do a final view test before releasing the 4K cut. Too busy thinking about Scrooge McDucking his way through mountains of cash if as Netflix and Skydance get into a bidding war over Warner Bros.
