Hola Hollywood tech nerds!

In this week’s post:

🍸️ How Do You Screw Up Mad Men?

👧 The Associated Press Falls for Tilly Norwood

🍿 Kernels: 3 links worth making popcorn for

How Do You Screw Up Mad Men?

Last week HBO Max debuted the new 4K remaster of one of the titanic shows of the prestige era: Mad Men… and ended up with copious amounts of egg on their face!

That wasn’t the only issue Twitter users reported:

There are a few others that have been surfaced, which you can find in the QTs of the original tweet. The pertinent question is: how the f#@k do you blow it this badly with one of the biggest TV shows of all time? As someone who has worked at a streaming service, a content provider, and a pipeline between the two, I am uniquely qualified to speculate!

First, we can dispel with the idea that these screwups were intentionally included in order to drum up added interest in Mad Men, a classic Internet assumption that arises in the wake of most any viral mistake. The Vanity Fair writeup indulges in this with its clickbaity headline “Mad Men’s Viral Vomit Hose Mistake Seems Like “Subversive Advertising,” Says Original Editor.” Well, no, that’s not precisely what he does say:

He’s describing the screwup by referencing the context of the show and the knock-on viral effects of the errors, not suggesting that HBO Max would do this on purpose. Indeed, HBO has had past controversies related to remasters and would certainly not be interested in blowing such an important title launch by making themselves look incompetent.

If HBO did purposefully let these errors through after being caught by their QC process, the much more likely explanation is that they had advertised a December 1 launch date to which they had to adhere, and simply hoped that the issues would be fixable before anyone noticed.

However, this latter scenario would only make sense if the issues were entirely missing VFX, something that HBO would have had no control over and couldn’t fix themselves. Since there were also audio streaming and episode listing problems, which are errors that a streamer can correct internally, I would guess that HBO’s QC is significantly lacking due to one or more of the following problems:

Laxness - if HBO’s QC operators are simply doing spot checks for technical issues, it’s very easy for problems like these to slip through. I worked at a streamer and the QC process assumed the assets we received from the studios were good to go. We would do a simple spot check and get it ready to go live on the site.

Automation - if HBO has entirely automated their QC process via a program like Baton, such a process would similarly only flag technical issues with the assets. There would be no way for these tools to check for content discrepancies.

Outsourcing - if HBO outsources its QC overseas, it’s possible such an operator might have difficulty identifying the issues users reported, simply due to being unfamiliar with the context of Mad Men, such as Peggy Olson walking under modern signs.

HBO has taken most of the heat online because the general public frequently doesn’t grasp the intricacies of who owns the content vs who broadcasts it (even Vanity Fair gets tripped up, incorrectly asserting that Mad Men’s original broadcast network AMC is owned by Mad Men rights-holder Lionsgate).

While HBO failed in at least one of the ways listed above, the primary failure is located somewhere in the aforementioned Lionsgate pipeline. From The Hollywood Reporter: 

This is feasible, and a bungled delivery via one of their digital distribution vendors would explain the episodes being out of order and having incorrect audio streams. However, such bungling doesn’t completely identify why color-corrected 4K files with some missing VFX would have been produced in the first place. That would be the fault of whichever vendor supervised the 4K remaster and then provided those files.

To conclude, this was a disaster with failures at every step. Given the trends in the business, I have to assume the central organizing problem that afflicted Mad Men’s rollout was a complete lack of rigorous QC at each possible pain point due to some combination of staff cutbacks and automation. Everyone assumed a quality control process elsewhere, and any actual QC was hobbled for the reasons I noted above, at all of the companies involved. This is the process of Cory Doctorow’s concept of “Enshittification” in action. As Pete Campbell once said:

The Associated Press Falls for Tilly Norwood

I was Incredibly irritated to find this tweet come across my feed:

I would have assumed that at least non-entertainment reporters would be able to escape Xicoia’s absurd framing, but the grift remains powerful! As always, let us apply the Shrek Rule and see how it reads:

I don’t need to rehash the same things I’ve written about this fake story, I will simply continue to ask the same question: where is the product? Why does a company with no demonstrable product keep getting free press?

Kernels (3 links worth making popcorn for)

Here’s a round-up of cool and interesting links about Hollywood and technology:

Video game adaptations continue to show strength with FNAF 2 box office. (link)

The incredible VFX techniques behind The Incredible Shrinking Man. (link)

AI slop is ruining Reddit. (link)