Mad Men is probably one of the best 10 television shows ever made. Itâs certainly one of the most important. It came to define a late aughts âgolden ageâ 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 itâs equally fitting, in a way, that the 4K re-release of Mad Men on HBO includes sloppy oversights that make it emblematic of mediaâs current enshitification in the streaming era.
The ultra-HD makeover of AMCâs period drama about an advertising agency straddling the cultural revolution of the â60s 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 seriesâ most memorable moments. In season 1, episode 7, âRed in the Face,â 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. Itâs an important moment that underlines a bunch of conflicting fault lines within their relationship. Itâs also very gross. In the new 4K version, viewers are treated to the actual puke machine that hurls clam chowder out of a pipe next to Sterlingâs face, as well as the stagehands deploying it. Itâs beautifully absurd and also kind of undercuts the entire scene. Update 12/2/25, 2:23 p.m. ET: Hereâs the actual video of the moment:
Lol it's real https://t.co/dw1AFZTvGd pic.twitter.com/0AXfbDLBGL
â The Sopranos Guyâą (@uncle_june) December 2, 2025
âThis is hilarious, and the extra hand on the crew memberâs shoulder is killing me,â wrote one commenter on Reddit. âLike someone else is giving him extra emotional support while he shoots fake vomit from a tube.â Weâve seen this sort of thing happen before, but itâs usually when older shows get updated to newer aspect ratios and stuff that wasnât originally intended to be part of the scene makes it into the frame.
The fact that the apparatus and its handlers werenât 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 TVâs 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 Mad Men while doing other stuff just a couple of 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 didnât 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 didnât want to pay someoneâs 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 Netflix and Skydance get into a bidding war over Warner Bros.
Update 12/2/25 5:05 p.m. ET: According to Vulture, this whole debacle wasnât technically HBOâs fault. An anonymous source (from HBO?) said it was Lionsgate that delivered the wrong files, which I guess HBO then just uploaded without checking. Oops! Also, the episode order mix-up has been fixed, but the barf machine remains. As podcaster Todd Vaziri points out in a very fun, illustrative Bluesky thread, there are other instances where visual effects that were added in post-production are missing from the current HBO version of the show.
