The biggest lesson is that there isn't much out there that is as great as Mad Men. It's going to be a long wait until the show returns next summer, but until then, maybe we can all keep ourselves warm with one of these substitues, but it's doubtful.

The Prisoner
Similarities to Mad Men: Mining '60s culture for a modern day story.
Differences from Mad Men: This remake seems to be scared of its heritage, avoiding the pseudo-psychedelic, swinging London vibe of the original.
Reasons to Watch: AMC thinks it's a worthy replacement to Mad Men, placing The Prisoner in Mad Men's time slot cage for its six-episode run. Ian McKellen is pretty awesome in everything, espeically when he plays the villain.
Reasons to Avoid: We were underwhelmed with the first installment, and it's only six episodes long. That will barely get us through the first month of MM withdrawl.
Replacement Analogy: The Prisoner is to a Rolling Stones cover band as Mad Men is to Mick Jagger live in concert.

Dexter
Similarities to Mad Men: An intelligent drama with a dark mood and characters with questionable morality that every so often has some grisly blood spray.
Differences from Mad Men: Showtime's serial killer drama doesn't have the subtlety that we get from Draper and company.
Reasons to Watch: It is an interesting and suspenseful take with a very distinct point of view. This season John Lithgow is doing a knock-out job playing the calm but crazy Trinity Killer.
Reasons to Avoid: There's lots of back story to catch up on, and if you don't like blood, guts, and murders, you're better off cracking open a book.
Replacement Analogy: Dexter is to a bludgeoning as Mad Men is to a slow death by poison.

Brothers and Sisters
Similarities to Mad Men: Lots of family drama and intrigue in the work place.
Differences from Mad Men: Ojai Foods is a far cry from Sterling Cooper, and Betty Draper couldn't care less about her kids where as meddlesome Nora Walker can't go 10 minutes without calling them on the phone.
Reasons to Watch: ABC's ensemble drama has a look inside some fun and wacky family dynamics. Also, Nora has a hot new boyfriend.
Reasons to Avoid: This season has the two story lines that make all TV shows boring: cancer and pregnancy. Every episode is kind of the same: there's a secret, the family has a dinner party, the secret comes out at the party, everyone fights, then they make up. Yawn.
Replacement Analogy: Brothers and Sisters is to a family funeral as Mad Men is to an Irish wake.

Curb Your Enthusiasm
Similarities to Mad Men: A wealthy, creative, annoying man driving everyone crazy.
Differences from Mad Men: Larry David only dreams he could be as handsome as Don Draper, and when Mad Men makes you cringe, it's from finely crafted emotional storytelling, not wacky embarrassing stunts.
Reasons to Watch: Haven't you heard, there's a Seinfeld Reunion and it's only on HBO.
Reasons to Avoid: Larry David.
Replacement Analogy: Curb Your Enthusiasm is to Bruno as Mad Men is to Borat.

Family Guy
Similarities to Mad Men: Um...
Differences from Mad Men: This ubiquitous, animated Fox comedy that is a string of non sequiturs, absurdest rants, and silly ditties is about as far away from the '60s advertising drama as you're going to get.
Reasons to Watch: In case you need to have a conversation with a straight boy between the ages of 16 and 28.
Reasons to Avoid: It's Family Guy.
Replacement Analogy: Family Guy is to beer bongs as Mad Men is to scotch.

60 Minutes
Similarities to Mad Men: CBS' news magazine also features bunch of people who have been working since the early '60s.
Differences from Mad Men: The people are old now (and don't dress as sharply) and think they still know what goes on in the world.
Reasons to Watch: Inappropriate crushes on Leslie Stahl and nostalgia for the ticking watch.
Reasons to Avoid: Andy Rooney.
Replacement Analogy: 60 Minutes is to Parade as Mad Men is to vintage Esquire.

Going to the Movies
Similarities to Mad Men: Decadent and at times either serious or comedic, depending on the mood.
Differences from Mad Men: It's the movies, not TV, so every time it's different. This week we went to see Fantastic Mr. Fox, which was smooth, sylish, and visually interesting, like Mad Men, but its overwrought hipster vibe couldn't be different from the show's cool detachment.
Reasons to Watch: Going to the movies every week will keep you culturally relevant. If you catch the late show on Sunday night when MM is usually on, the cineplex is also less crowded than the rest of the weekend
Reasons to Avoid: Leaving the house on Sunday night, $12.50 a pop, and the empty calories from all that pop corn.
Replacement Analogy: Going to the movies is to Twizzlers as Mad Men is to Betty's meatloaf.

Mad Men on DVD
Similarities to Mad Men: Well, it's Mad Men, just all the ones you've seen already.
Differences from Mad Men: No commercials, watch as many as you want whenever you want, bonus material.
Reasons to Watch: With a show as difficult as this, you can't catch everything the first time around, so a rewatch is definitely rewarding. Knowing what happens in season three puts everything in seasons one and two in a different context.
Reasons to Avoid: There are no surprises.
Replacement Analogy: Mad Men on DVD is to your wedding day as Mad Men on TV is to your first date with your future spouse.

He talks about love, he talks about charity, he bares his soul and grapples with the meaning of redemption. But obviously, all anyone cares about is hearing about is hearing about his fake hair, and other humiliations. Here they are:

1. The Time He Was Afraid His Wig Would Fall Off at the French Open. In the early years of his male-pattern baldness, a rabidly narcissistic Agassi took to wearing a flamboyantly high-maintenance weave. As if it wasn't enough that the hair that made him famous was fake, Agassi admits that it was a crappy fake, too: At the 1990 French Open, Agassi's conditioner caused his weave to fall apart, forcing his brother to bobby pin it to his head and the horrified tennis diva to go all sweaty-palmed over whether his scalp pelt would go flying mid-match.

2. His Girlfriend, Brooke Shields, Convinced Him to Ditch the Pelt and Shave His Head. There is something tragic about the moment when a balding man realizes he can fluff and rearrange no longer, and that it's time to give up on hair entirely. It is even more tragic when said balding man is Andre Agassi, and his famously hot actress girlfriend is the one who has to tell him he's reached the point of no return.

3. Ruined His Career with a Meth Addiction. Couric rattles off members of the tennis community who have public distanced themselves from Agassi following the revelation that he was junked up on meth for "the better part of 1997," when his pro career began to plummet. Confronted with Martina Navratilova's accusation that he is "up there with Roger Clemens," Agassi blinks repeatedly and speaks through a strangled voice as he points out that using steroids to be good at baseball is really nothing like the self-destructive pattern of chronic methamphetamine use, and anyone who equates the two is sort of a jerk. "I had a problem. I would ask for some compassion."

4. He dumped Brooke Shields. This is only mildly humiliating for Agassi. (What kind of fool dumps Brooke Shields?!) The real humiliation is Brooke's, because she had some really embarrassing relationships in the '80s and '90s, and then, just when it seemed like she had snagged herself a real catch, turned out he was a deeply troubled, self-hating drug addict—and then he dumped her. Good thing Shields' love life worked itself out, because if things had gone differently, she could be deep into Jennifer Aniston territory by now.

Maher cites the CDC website that shows ingredients of the vaccine including aluminum, insect repellent, and formaldehyde, which, incidentally can all be found in the Playboy mansion grotto that Maher's known to frequent.

Maher went on to connect the dots to other procedures we now know are dangerous, like filling teeth with mercury. Without skipping a beat, in response to Maher's question as to if he ever had his teeth filled with mercury, Alec Baldwin deadpanned, "Yeah, that's why I became an actor."

Chris Matthews asked Maher why he's talking about this, Maher countered that he's just trying to have the debate. But Maher already had the debate last week with Bill Frist and was trying to use the panel to air out his grievances. Baldwin wasn't having it "Bill, you having us on the show and rehashing all the problems you got into on your last show is like going on a date and talking about your ex-wife." leaving Maher with a perfect softball to toss back to Baldwin who left himself wide open saying "Maybe we can talk about your past problems."

A 60 Minutes report by correspondent Scott Pelley revealed a demographic most susceptible to the H1N1 virus. "This is one of the really tragic parts of this epidemic. That people who are in the prime of their life - totally healthy can suddenly become so sick,"

If it wasn't bad enough that boomers left them with one of the worst economies in 50 years, The Youngs now have an epidemic with a target placed squarely on their messenger bag-carrying backs. Why does the virus have such age discrimination? Dr. Peter Palese of Mt. Sinai Medical Center in New York told 60 Minutes that older folks have built up a immunity from viruses lingering from the 1940s they came in contact with.

Will the vaccine kill you? Only one way to find out.

Dreier's that hot shot lawyer who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for selling phony promisory notes and raking in about $400 million for his "law firm." Then he was caught and now his name's synonymous with dirt. So, why'd he do it?

Dreier's been saying all along that he wasn't motivated by greed, as some would assume, but because he had an insatiable thirst for success. Or, as he explained it to the 60 Minutes' audience, his plot was akin to a midlife crisis:

I was very disappointed in my life. I guess some people would say maybe a lot of men reach a so-called midlife crisis. I was 52.... I remember being at a place in my life where I was perhaps desperate to better myself and to make a place for myself.

But even his ambition-fueled thievery was topped. Sure, he was a media sensation for a minute, but Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme soon broke and became the amoral financial litmus test. At his sentencing, the judge even said, "he is not Mr. Madoff from any analysis, and that's why I can't understand why the government is asking for 145 years." Ouch.

Now poor Dreier, so filled with ambition, so eager to be the best, comes with the moniker "mini-Madoff" and has to whore himself out to 60 Minutes and — yeesh! — Vanity Fair.

And the worst part? He has to come up with some bullshit self-analysis to explain it all and, we guess, elicit some sympathy from the masses. Well, it didn't work. Now we just think he's a sad sack coward. At least just fess up and say you liked money and yachts. That's what a real man would do.

Goldberg, a right-wing writer who once worked at CBS and then made a second career trashing the network's lefty ways, went on The O'Reilly Factor to rehash the debate, and claims a "deep throat like tip" informed him Mapes knew that Bush had wanted to go the Vietnam, but didn't have enough flying hours. Thus, says Goldberg, Mapes intentionally withheld the information and aired the erroneous report, which claimed Bush attempted to skirt his militant duties.

The entire thing proves beyond a reasonable doubt that CBS loves liberals, Rather and Mapes deserved what they got and should be shot into the sun. Or, at least, publicly shamed on Fox News.

Hewitt worked at CBS News for more than 60 years. In 1948, he "directed the first network television newscast." He went on to direct CBS news anchors there from Murrow to Cronkite to Rather. He founded 60 Minutes—and the entire TV news magazine format—in 1968. He presided over the famous Nixon-Kennedy TV debate, in which an absence of makeup supposedly scared the nation away from Nixon. And he had his hardcore moments—these were his instructions to Dan Rather after JFK was assassinated, and rumors surfaced that a guy named Zapruder had a tape of the whole thing:

"Dan. Go to his house. Tell him you wanna see the tape. After he shows it to ya, sock him. Take it. Take it back to our station and let them put it on tape. We'll have it. Then take it back and give it to him. Now they can only get you for assault. They can't get you for robbery because you just gave it back, and let the CBS lawyers argue about who it belongs to."

Hewitt stepped down from 60 Minutes in 2004 to serve as executive producer of CBS News. He was hospitalized with pancreatic cancer last March, and now it's killed him.

The biggest stain on Hewitt's career was the Jeffrey Wigand case—later made into the movie The Insider—in which Hewitt caved to CBS management's demands to censor a 60 Minutes spot about dirty business by tobacco executives. The company feared a lawsuit so big it would kill them, and Hewitt complied with their wishes, pissing off more journalistically inclined colleagues. He later admitted he wasn't proud of himself. Oh well. We all make mistakes. He was a giant and CBS will miss him. Here's Al Pacino's grand speech, from the movie, decrying the BUSINESSMEN posing as NEWSMEN. Journalism lives, we hope.

The segment began with Vick telling the world how he realizes what he did was wrong and how so very sorry he is for having done it:

The first day I walked into prison, and he slammed that door, I knew the magnitude of the decision that I made, and the poor judgment, and what I allowed to happen to the animals. And, you know, it's no way of explaining the hurt and the guilt that I felt. And that was the reason I cried so many nights. And that put it all into perspective...I let myself down, not being out on the football field, being in a prison bed, in a prison bunk, writing letters home, you know. That wasn't my life. That wasn't the way that things was supposed to be. And all because the so-called culture that I thought was right, that I thought it was cool. and I thought it was fun, and it was exciting at the time. It all led to me laying in a prison bunk by myself with no one to talk to but myself.

Asked who he blames for it all, Vick responded, "I blame me."

Brown, who reportedly scooped NBC's Bob Costas and America's thuggish overlord/fast food terrorist Oprah in scoring the interview, didn't seem to go easy on Vick and asked all of the questions one would reasonably hope he would ask. The big post-interview question in the public's mind now seems to be, "Are Michael Vick's expressions of remorse sincere?" Judging by the comments in the thread attached to the story on CBS' website and on Twitter, it seems as though most people think he's full of shit and thus should be punished further and in barbaric fashion, which is just plain ridiculous.

Keeping in mind that the crimes Mike Vick pled guilty to are horrific in ways unimaginable to most of us, the guy served his time behind bars as dictated by this country's legal system and did so without incident, losing a multi-million dollar personal fortune and his dignity along the way. Now he's out trying to put the pieces of his broken life back together again, working closely with the humane society to educate inner city kids about the immoralities of animal abuse, and his detractors are still not happy, nor will they ever be frankly. Even if there was some way to tap into Michael Vick's soul to prove without a doubt that he really does feels guilty about what he did, there still would be a large segment of the population that wouldn't be satisfied unless Vick himself were mauled by blood-thirsty dogs inside of cage in an arena filled with thousands of screaming animal rights activists and broadcast around the world on television.

Sadly, many of the unforgiving seem to be of the liberal persuasion, the left side of the ideological spectrum where virtues such as empathy, forgiveness and tolerance are supposed to be most revered, proving once again that hypocrisy knows no political boundaries.

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While Morley Safer's profile was, in its totality, quite interesting, as its vexing and somewhat mystery-shrouded subject tends to be, what may be even more interesting is what the profile made didn't mention:

• Wintour's contract with Vogue is set to expire soon and that she and Conde Nast have a long history of using the media to gain advantages during tough contract negotiations.
• Longstanding rumors of S.I. Newhouse's desire to replace Wintour with French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld.
• The overall decline in financial health over at Conde Nast, which recently reported a 26% drop in ad pages in its first quarter and shuttered Portfolio, its perpetually struggling $100 million business magazine.
  
  But to her credit, Wintour did look like 200,000 bucks.
  
  
  

  
  Anna Wintour on 60 Minutes [CBS News]
  
  

The Quoted Ones:
Andre Leon Talley – Editor at Large.
Grace Coddington – Creative Director.
Designers: Karl Lagerfeld, John Galliano, Nicholas Ghesquiere.
And Bernard Arnault, Chairman of LVMH.

If you thought you might be quoted, but you're not on this list: Sorry. Take heart, though. There's much more to learn about Anna in the last two days!

• Anna reveals why she wears sunglasses: "I can sit in a show and if I am bored out of my mind, nobody will notice . . . At this point, they have become, really, armor." That's thoroughly unsurprising.
• Anna gave a public interview at the 92nd St. Y this week which cause fashionistas to pass out in paroxysms of overwhelmedness just by its mere existence! PETA protested her for being a fur-wearing murderess, but she totally shrugged it off to the delight of the crowd!
• Here's a fairly complete transcript of the the interview. Let's pull out one interesting bit, shall we?
  Q: You've said it's time to move on from a job when you get too angry. Are you getting to the point where you're thinking about other options?
  A: Well, mostly I'm thinking about the next day. I think that I have the best job in the entire world. To be honest, I don't think I'd be very good at anything else!
  Anna I think you would be a great schoolmarm or foreign policy analyst so don't give up, ever!

Here's the preview clip of her 60 Minutes appearance. In which she is in charge:

60 Minutes said it wasn't ready to reveal next Sunday's story lineup just yet. But after this weekend, the news magazine goes into repeats for most of the summer. We first heard of it back in January and The Cut reported that CBS News cameras were following the fashion world's queen bee as far back as last November. Morley Safer was spotted sitting next to Wintour at New York's Fashion Week this past February.

First her documentary The September Issue premieres in January at Sundance (and is due in theaters in, duh, September) and now 60 Minutes — why is Anna suddenly so press friendly? Probably for exactly the same ones as why there was another sudden burst of rumors about Si Newhouse bringing in French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld to New York to replace her: Anna's contract is up for renewal later this year. A burst of publicity can't hurt to build leverage — though unlike the September Issue, which was filmed during the boom days of 2007, when Vogue was thick with ads, the 60 Minutes piece is being filmed during the Great Magazine Die-Off when even Conde Nast is tightening its belts. Consider our DVR locked and loaded for Sunday.

What?

Apparently this whole gaffe situation is just made unbearably terrible by our notoriously volatile president (*cough*) hinting at Biden's mistakes in public, ever, so he apologized this one time, Biden would like everyone to know, via 60 Minutes.

Biden added on the show, "much of the ridicule of me is well deserved.”

Which is true, but we're already tired of thinking about it, and about Joe Biden's ego. Joe Biden is what you call a "high maintenance" boyfriend.

Politico's stated aim is to "explain how Washington really works." This is how Washington really works: Find something, anything, that can be packaged into fodder to serve the interests of somebody with a megaphone. Obama just laughed on TV! The laughter, on its own terms, wouldn't really cut it with Drudge or the evening cable news chatter.

So Obama didn't just laugh: He laughed in a way that could be seen as amplifying the sense that he is cool and detached. Which fits into a narrative! That Matt Drudge wants to advance! And which Politico has been gathering string on going back to the campaign! And also which, because Matt Drudge wants to advance it, cable new producers will create segments about tonight. After the 2010 mid-term elections, exit pollsters will ask voters whether Obama is too cool and detached, and this is why.

Obama laughed a couple times last night in Steve Kroft's interview, prompting Kroft to ask the president if he is "punch drunk." Drudge promoted the exchange late last night, but he didn't point readers to the 60 Minutes web site, where readers could find an account of the interview and watch the actual video. He linked to a Politico story warning that the "awkward laughter highlighted an issue Obama has faced dating back to the campaign, a sense that he sometimes is too 'cool' and detached to fully grasp the public anxiety over mounting job losses and economic worries."

Coolness and detachment are a potentially serious political problem for Obama, according to Politico: In January they reported that "the cool and detached Obama enters the White House at a time of considerable economic anxiety," and back during the campaign they noted that he was "known for a cool and occasionally detached delivery."

None of this has anything even remotely to do with what, if anything, it means that Obama laughed during his 60 Minutes interview. Obama himself chalked it up to gallows humor. It's about finding a way to feed a huge constituency of media franchises who—either because they have partisan agendas or because they desperately need things to talk about on TV—are looking for prepackaged narratives that will "pop." Politico is basically doing the same thing that writers for Ellen do—scanning headlines for stories that DeGeneres can riff on. It's just that their doing it for Drudge and Chris Matthews and Bill O'Reilly and Wolf Blitzer, and they're doing it for free.

Which is why you get stories about Barack Obama's secret code language for black people, his crippling teleprompter addiction, his barely restrained rage for Politico reporters who ask him questions during a friendly visit to the White House press corps' offices, and how he's in thrall to fat-cat academics. Politico's crack political team simply has their antennae set to "things Drudge could conceivably link to" and they keep coming up with hits. Good for them. We all need hits these days.

Having him ask why he's crying.

On the surface it might seem callous and out of touch for the president to say, "sorry, buddy, you still got the job" to the Treasury Secretary, who pushed for those ridiculous AIG bonuses, and didn't pay his taxes, and fumbled his financial bailout plan, and is probably doing so again. (The right is already calling that (with no apparent irony) the president's "Brownie Moment.")

Or to laugh about maybe not being able to bail out the auto industry.

But you know what? People don't want to see the president trashing his underling while they watch, or to see their relatively young and inexperienced leader betraying the slightest hint of fear about the already-terrifying economy.

And they'd downright expect their president to laugh at Steve Kroft's improbable question about whether America was in danger of losing all its genius financial executives to hedge funds, since the government has capped some bankers' pay at a quarter million dollars a year.

Here's to hoping "a little gallows humor," as the president described it, gives Obama not only some good PR, but the perspective to stop coddling his Treasury Secretary's banker friends. Because the administration's financial bailout plan is scary. (Seriously.)

Laughing moments are excerpted in the clip above; below find an embed of the whole segment.

And to think that just a few days ago the sustainable food crusader was helping 60 Minutes paint her as an out-of-touch elitst.

Amid the recession, "you're a dreamer," correspondent Lesley Stahl told Waters.

Indeed, and not always the savviest in selling her San Francisco Bay Area vision of non-poisoned food to the rest of the country. But Waters has been nothing if not persistent — "the steamroller is on its way," Stahl warned Obama — and Michelle Obama's plan swallows whole her vision of using the White House garden to encourage kids to eat more fruits and vegetables (and less processed food).

The first lady, in fact, paid Waters the ultimate compliment: Not mentioning her by name, it would appear, in an interview about the garden with the New York Times. In politics, everyone wants to take credit for the truly attractive ideas.

We'll grant Waters could use more press savvy; scoffing at microwave ovens and using her kitchen fireplace to demonstrate home cooking, as the restaurateur-turned-food-crusader did on 60 Minutes, makes Waters look like the Northern California dilettante she is often made out to be. As does knocking people who spend money on Nike sneakers rather than organic produce.

Instead of Nikes, Waters should have talked about how Americans spend less on food, as a percentage of income, than they ever have before. Americans, on the whole, could afford to eat better if they chose to make healthier food a priority.

But for all the elitist vibes Waters gave off — prompting even foodies to chortle— the news cycle was on her side.

No sooner had Stahl finished asking "Is she kidding??" than the New York Times reported that six percent of retail pork in a recent test carried a deadly staph infection, MRSA, that kills 18,000 Americans each year.

How did that happen? Unlike other pathogens, MRSA thrives in the face of antibiotics. And America "continue[s] to allow agribusiness companies to add antibiotics to animal feed" indiscriminately, columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote, "unlike Europe and even South Korea."

Now there's an exciting new pig strain of MRSA, which seems to be jumping to humans. This is one of the many reasons Waters is pushing people to buy antibiotic-free meats and other farmers-market-type goods regardless of the economic climate. She's apparently just too polite to say so.

Your lone fashion week outing, and some old guy spoils your chance to sit next to the editor of Vogue. Sorry, Serena. But at least the clothes at the Ralph Lauren show were totally worth it. (And, hey, maybe Safer's Wintour profile will give you a reason to start exploring this "news" programming you've heard so much about.)

(Photos: Getty Images)

Swoon.

If the Bush years were about winging it, Sullenberger is the refreshing antidote: Someone who knows how to do his job.

And not just as a pilot. Sullenberger, somehow, can handle not only a water landing on the Hudson River but also being elevated from mere mortal to the walking embodiment of a nation's hopes for itself. As he indicates at the end of the clip above, the pilot is fully aware of the projection that's going on and is trying his best to handle it with grace.

He's already ensured himself a distinguished record in that regard, too.