Like With Milk, Only To Chin Dimples

I am ridiculously loyal. It takes enormous, even catastrophic events to make me reconsider my allegiances.

Without realizing it, my loyalties have apparently transferred to "Mad Men," even though I was on the job for little more than a week, and physically in the office even less than that. The first sign was the great satisfaction I felt when the show racked up two Golden Globe nominations and three WGA nominations. It wasn't a personal satisfaction -- interns don't have that kind of influence on final cuts of episodes. But it gives me so much pleasure to see so much hard work rewarded.

Almost as good, the TV critic for my hometown paper, Maureen Ryan, put the show at the top of her list of Top Ten TV Shows of 2007. That's awesome. If I ever meet Ms. Ryan, I may have to kiss her on the mouth. I hope she doesn't mind.

On the other hand, I wish I had a wet, icy snowball, perfect aim and a spot outside the offices of New York magazine, so I could bean John Leonard in the ear for inexplicably labeling this same heavily-praised show one of the "Best Ideas that Went South." This from the same guy who thinks Anna Friel* is the best thing on television and "Women's Murder Club" as the best new show of the year.

In a month or two, the strike will end and I will no longer be an out of work assistant, nursing petty grudges. I will have to rise above all that and be mature and not post on the Television Without Pity boards about how Don Draper is not Jewish. Not that I ever did that. And I definitely didn't post any comments about the show's research and the meticulous attention to detail w/r/t the pronunciation of "keitan," the little-known Japanese suicide sub used in WWII.

But right now, I owe Mr. Leonard cold, hard one to the left ear.

*I am Friel-intolerant. It is embarrassing to me, but she makes me nuts. I came to the fall 2007 season expecting to love "Pushing Daisies," and tragically, discovered in the pilot that I cannot look at Anna Friel or hear her voice for more than 5 second together. She's the strobe light and I'm the epileptic. It's not fair or right, but it's how I feel.