The 4K restoration of Mad Men on HBO Max includes a look at the guys operating a puke machine.
Photo: HBO Max
Mad Men went up on HBO Max on Monday, which is great news for people who love television and really good suits. It hasn’t been on one of the major streaming platforms for years, meaning that if you wanted to enjoy the greatest show of the 21st century, you either had to buy each season or join the Interview With a Vampire fandom paying for AMC+. Thankfully, we can now rejoice, as the show has made its way to a major streamer — and in dazzling 4K to boot! Every episode is now so clear that when Roger Sterling vomits after walking up dozens of flights of stairs on a stomach full of oysters and martinis, you can actually see the guy operating the puke machine.
It seems that part of the show’s 4K restoration included a change of aspect ratio, meaning either we’re seeing more of the original shot than what initially aired on AMC or HBO Max forgot to redo some postproduction edits. In the case of Roger spewing his lunch in the season-one episode “Red in the Face,” that means we see the crew members whose job it was to make him throw up and the tube apparatus funneling vomit toward John Slattery’s body.
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
If this were the only mistake from HBO’s big Mad Men rollout, that would probably be fine. We’d all have a laugh and say, “Remember when they left that coffee cup in Game of Thrones? Things happen!” However, the issues don’t stop there. Remember how I said Roger’s lunch comes back up in “Red in the Face”? Well, on HBO Max, it happens in an episode named “Babylon.” The fifth, sixth, and seventh episodes of season one are all out of order (it currently goes six, seven, five). So if you’re like me and were scanning through “Red in the Face” to find the puke, you were actually just reminded about all the sad stuff that happens with Don Draper’s brother.
How does this sort of thing happen? Well, I don’t know; it seems like it should be pretty easy to make sure that you can’t see the guy with the big puke machine. HBO did not respond to a request for comment, presumably because it is currently scrambling to figure out a ChatGPT prompt that can remove a whole person from a shot without messing up a mid-century-modern vibe.
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