Each time you want to see an episode, you'll have to pay twice - once for your monthly VOD subscription and once for that particular episode.
By ARYEH DEAN COHENmad men tv show(photo credit: )
If I had to come up with an image to describe my cable provider, HOT, it wouldn't be too hard to imagine: a muddy, fat, selfish pig.
There's no other way to describe the company that recently announced it was going to offer the Emmy-winning drama Mad Men, about ad execs in the '60s. Sounds good, right? Wrong!
The program's second season, which is now being shown in the US on basic cable, is only available on HOT's VOD (video on demand) service. Meaning each time you want to see an episode, you'll have to pay twice - once for your monthly VOD subscription and once for that particular episode.
When Xtra HOT chose Mad Men for its schedule last year, we praised the team that chooses the programming during trips to Hollywood every spring. But offering the first season and then, after it proves a success, deciding that the next season will only be available on a pay per view platform is just plain piggish.
Not that the HOT piggy banks aren't already full of money from channels people are paying for and not exactly enjoying; our bill just went up, The Movie Channel available to non-digital subscribers is just awful, and a check of Xtra HOT's schedule on a recent night saw timeslots filled with reruns of such awful shows as The E Ring and other losers. Meanwhile, Xtra HOT trumpets the arrival - finally - of a new series: the awful Cane, Dallas retooled starring Jimmy Smits, which has already been canned in the US
During the Succot holiday, Xtra HOT is apparently going to take the easy way out, showing multiple episodes of programs nightly. Apparently, so the schedule-makers can take a few days off. So multiple episodes of Without a Trace and others currently being shown, will at least bump off some of that awful flotsam. But it remains to be seen whether these are new episodes - in which case, if you're not home that night you'll miss three episodes, not just one - or reruns of past episodes, in which case, why bother?
For now, at least, fans of Mad Men can show just how mad they are by flooding *6900 with calls demanding that the show be shifted to Xtra HOT. Otherwise we can simply join HOT in the barnyard: as cash cows happy to be milked.
Meanwhile, in the US, a new fall season is just under way with new additions, some fascinating and others appalling.
Most interesting is the US version of Life on Mars, which was originally going to be David E. Kelley's baby. ABC didn't like what the creator of Boston Legal and other series was doing with the UK import, so they shook things up, the cast in particular, which is now set to feature Harvey Keitel, in the role of the time-traveling cop's boss, as well as Michael Imperioli (The Sopranos), in, I assume, the US equivalent to the Ray role.
J.J. Abrahams' latest, Fringe, is already viewable on-line and is a creepy, X-Files-like offering. NBC's My Own Worst Enemy has Christian Slater in a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde-type predicament. And, HBO's got True Blood, about a young woman who hangs out with vampires in New Orleans, by the maker of Six Feet Under.
Hopefully, the folks at HOT or YES will soon begin showing these series. Hopefully, without charging us extra to see them.
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