But the problem goes beyond a change of aspect ratio. Remastering shows that were originally shot with more primitive technology sometimes goes horribly awry, like an I Love Lucy clip that went viral last year showing a pair of once-blurry background actors brought into so much focus that they now looked like surreal Picasso sketches.
I visited the set of Frasier in the late nineties, as the TV industry was preparing for the shift from standard to hi-def. As I admired the decor of Dr. Crane’s living room, one of the acclaimed sitcom’s producers lamented that all of it would look much shabbier in HD than in the more visually forgiving SD format, and worried that they’d have to go to the expense of rebuilding all of their standing sets. Frasier, Lucy, and so many others were created without a thought to how they might one day look in a format that didn’t even exist at the time.
While countless classic movies have been successfully remastered for HD or 4K, they’re also standalone projects, where real care and attention can be given to each frame. Seinfeld and I Love Lucy both made 180 episodes. The Simpsons made 429 episodes in standard-def. Doing quality control with that amount of product is very difficult, which is how so many of these mistakes get made. (In the case of The Simpsons, Disney+ eventually introduced an option to watch the first 20 seasons in their original aspect ratio.) Every now and then you get a situation like The Wire, whose creator David Simon insisted on being involved in the process of changing the gritty urban drama’s image quality and aspect ratio, but it’s rare.
This specific Mad Men error is an odd one, since the show was always presented in HD widescreen. But the first four seasons were shot on film, so perhaps in the remastering process, someone inadvertently used an alternate take of the vomit scene where the crew members hadn’t been digitally erased. A source close to the process said that Lionsgate gave HBO Max “incorrect files,” and that the proper versions will be uploaded ASAP.
