Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

There’s no prompt today. I wish more people around here would talk about Last Samurai Standing, a new J-drama that rules. Based on both the 2022 Shogo Imamura novel Ikusagami and Imamura’s manga adaptation of his own novel, Last Samurai Standing perfectly reflects—even though it’s set in the Meiji era and was filmed several months before Luigi Mangione’s killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO—the current anger towards billionaires, particularly during Shujiro Saga’s teary speech about the systematic elimination of samurai like himself at the end of the second episode. Last Samurai Standing star/action choreographer Junichi Okada’s rage during that speech got me turnt up. The Chair Company also rules. I’m glad Tim Robinson and Zach Kanin’s enjoyable comedy version of angsty and forgotten ’90s conspiracy dramas like Nowhere Man and Dead at 21 received its own thread over here.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Barry Gray’s “March of the Oysters,” which first appeared in the 1965 Stingray episode “Secret of the Giant Oyster.”

Remember when Roger Sterling drunkenly tried to put the moves on Betty Draper in her kitchen in Mad Men’s first season, and Don Draper—who, also, in a cruel moment I completely forgot about, wrongheadedly accused Betty of flirting with Roger—got revenge against Roger by luring him into enjoying nonstop oysters and martinis for lunch so that he’d end up being too pooped and distracted to entertain visiting staffers from Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign right after lunch?

Don’s scheme culminated in Roger puking in front of the campaign officials.

I remember the “Red in the Face” puking scene as a funny moment where Roger got his comeuppance. The thing I don’t remember about the scene is the goofy-looking appearance of two special effects technicians in 2007 garb operating a vomit machine with a tube that is strapped to the back side of John Slattery’s face, which is what HBO Max viewers saw when they put on a remastered-for-4K copy of “Red in the Face” earlier this week.

Lionsgate Television, which produced Mad Men, undertook a remastering project for its hit show (a show that was famously rejected by HBO, and that’s why it’s weird for me to see HBO Max acquiring Mad Men, the show that successfully ushered AMC into the business of prestige TV), but Lionsgate’s remastering efforts apparently suck. Mad Men relied on a lot of digital effects to recreate ’60s New York. Those effects, which included the erasure of the vomit machine and the crew members who manned it, and other kinds of post-production work were omitted when Lionsgate remastered the show. Bluesky user Paul Haine first pointed out the puke machine guys’ accidental appearance in the remastered version of “Red in the Face,” and outlets ranging from Vulture to the A.V. Club picked up on it.

By the way, people from the “Look at how the Bluesky bubble hurts liberals and their causes” crowd or people who defend Elon Musk-era Twitter and bash Bluesky for not being a cultural force like Twitter used to be can start shutting the fuck up now. Haine’s viral Bluesky post about the puke machine guys is proof that Bluesky—which I currently use because I’m a fan of Bluesky accounts like John Finn’s Discontinued Foods account and I’m not a Nazi—isn’t being ignored anymore.

The puke machine thing isn’t the only jarring mistake that showed up in the copies of Mad Men Lionsgate sent to HBO Max. The remastered version of “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” the Mad Men pilot, is without the crucial title card that started it all.

I’m having flashbacks to whatever company the Carsey-Werner sitcom mill turned to for its A Different World restoration project (it’s probably the Burbank-based Performance Post) and that company’s terrible use of AI to try to upscale A Different World. As podcaster Scott Hanselman pointed out in a series of damning TikTok videos earlier this year, the remastered A Different World episodes that were sent to Netflix by Carsey-Werner look fly and all-new if the hijinks at Hillman College are watched from a distance, but then he tells us to look closer.

Whitley’s mouth doesn’t look right. Masters of the Universe T-shirt text and door sign letters that the AI can’t read look like gibberish now. A young Loretta Devine looks like her face is melting. I remember Lisa Marie Todd as one of the Fly Girls I ogled when I was a teen who was obsessed with In Living Color and was able to recite Damon Wayans’s “Redd Foxx’s 1990 tax tips” sketch line by line (“Tip #2: If the IRS man show up to your house, lie. About everythang. Especially who you is”). During a Different World episode from 1988, a pre-In Living Color Todd now has an Aphex Twin face.

“That’s why you hire professionals. That’s why you remaster formally,” said Hanselman in the video where he showed a clip of Todd looking janky. “That’s why the folks that did The Wire, which is one of the greatest HD upscaling remakes ever, was done shot by shot, formally, with thought to the pan-and-scan… They scanned the original film. Like, I’m not an AI hater, I literally work on AI at Microsoft, but I’m telling you, the enshittification of the internet by throwing AI at everything because it’s easier, because it’s cheaper… [It’s frustrating] when there’s a piece of history here, which is A Different World, which is a seminal work. It is the first time that an HBCU has been on television. It is an accurate depiction of Black Greek life. It is an interesting piece of art.”

I remember being impressed by the results of Paramount’s meticulous Cheers restoration efforts and CBS’s even more meticulous Star Trek: The Next Generation remastering project. Those days are long gone. Certain corporations only want faster and cheaper methods nowadays. Great art is ruined when they resort to “faster and cheaper” to remaster it. I’m starting to feel like these old shows should just be left alone.

Physical media is better. Hold on to your Mad Men DVDs or Blu-rays.