Since we discussed the parallels between “The Benefactor” and The Sopranos yesterday, I want to recommend Andrew Johnston’s outstanding breakdown of the episode, and what Mad Men has learned from Matthew Weiner’s old show, at The House Next Door:

The Sopranos was a highly serialized show from the beginning, and in some ways became more

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Presented in the interest of equal time and completism, since we started the morning with one. This time from McCain again:

As Marc Ambinder (where I got the link) notes, it’s hard to know how widely McCain means web videos like this to be picked up, or whom it’s meant to persuade. But mocking the real-people testimonials is curious, …

The ratings—and/or the highly speculative guesswork—are in, and it turns out a billion people watched the Opening Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, over 34 million of them in the U.S. (That’s a smaller percentage of our population, but to be fair, much of the rest of the world’s population doesn’t have Cartoon Network.)

Beyond …

Isaac Hayes, who died over the weekend, was famous as an R&B singer/songwriter, but was most familiar to TV fans as the voice of Chef on South Park. When Chef was killed off the show—after a famous falling out between Hayes and Parker-Stone for the show’s making fun of Scientology, of which he was an adherent—it was a big loss: a …