Mad Men Fans Catch HBO Max 4K Goofs: Crew Cameos and Visible Vomit Machines
Binge-night chaos: episodes are dropping out of order, scrambling storylines and serving up spoilers before the setup.
Mad Men just got the fancy 4K treatment on Max like HBO promised back in November, and yep, it looks great. It also accidentally lets you see something you were never supposed to see: the people making the fake puke work.
What viewers are noticing
- In Season 1, Episode 7, 'Red in the Face', two crew members and their vomit rig sneak into frame during Roger Sterling's infamous lunch-then-stairs-then-puke scene. A Reddit user named b345tbr34th and a Twitter user going by Johnny spotted it.
- Some folks are also finding episodes and titles jumbled. On the HBO Max app for iPad, that puke scene reportedly shows up under 1.6, while 1.5, '5G', gets skipped or misfiled.
The vomit rig cameo
The moment hits at the end of Roger's boozy lunch with clients, when Don makes him climb 23 flights back to the office. John Slattery understandably could not projectile on command, so production used a tube and some stomach-churning stand-in substance to sell the shot. In the new 4K stream, you can briefly see two crew members holding the setup.
Why would that pop up now? The short version: changing aspect ratios and rescanning film can reveal stuff that used to be safely outside the frame. Viewers have seen similar quirks in other 4K updates, and even non-4K reframes once exposed stand-ins in Friends. It also looks very much like the original Mad Men release had those crew members digitally painted out, but the version on Max is sourced from before that cleanup.
If this was a true 4K remaster from the 35mm negatives, any old digital fixes (like erasing the rig) would need to be redone on the new scan. Miss one, and suddenly the magic trick is visible. It is a nerdy production detail, but it explains how a polished show can suddenly show the strings.
The episode order weirdness
On top of the visual hiccup, some subscribers say Season 1 is mislabeled in places. One example: on the HBO Max iPad app, the 'Red in the Face' content slotted under Episode 1.6, while 1.5 ('5G') did not play where expected. That sounds like a metadata slip that should be fixable, but it is confusing if you are rewatching or tracking first-time viewing.
HBO has been here before
Remember when a very modern coffee cup showed up in Game of Thrones Season 8, Episode 4 ('The Last of the Starks') during the Winterfell feast in front of Emilia Clarke? HBO defused it with a joke that still rules:
"In response to inquiries from those who saw a craft services coffee cup in Sunday night's episode of Game of Thrones, the latte that appeared in the episode was a mistake. Daenerys had ordered an herbal tea."
Would not be shocking if they quip their way out of this one too, then swap in a corrected file.
Bottom line
Mad Men is streaming now on Max, looking sharper than ever and, for the moment, a little more revealing than intended. Expect fixes once the noise reaches the right inbox.