Mad Men

The Envelope's Gold Standard columnist Glenn Whipp is sweeping through Emmy races this week, predicting the winners for Sunday night's show. To get the party started, he looks at the comedy and drama series categories. DRAMA SERIES The nominees: “Boardwalk Empire” (HBO) “Breaking Bad” (AMC) “Downton Abbey” (PBS) “Game of Thrones” (HBO) “Homeland” (Showtime) “Mad Men” (AMC) And the winner is … “Breaking Bad.” It's a coin flip, really, between the two acclaimed AMC series.

"Mad Men" is famous for its obsessive devotion to 1960s pop culture. Which is why clicking on this "Mad Men" remix video delivers the perfect delivery of a Rickroll at a time when the meme seems to have fallen out of fashion. For those who have forgotten, Rickrolling involves posting a link to a video or story with an enticing headline only to have it play Rick Astley's 1987 hit song "Never Gonna Give You Up. " British stand-up comedian Richard Sandling has gained a reputation for his "Perfect Movie" re-creations of famous film scenes using comedians, but his latest takes clips from the first four seasons of the hit AMC series and remixes them so that Don Draper and company are singing the words to the Astley hit. Rickrolling may be tired at this point (it's been around since 2007)

The gig: Partner and chief creative officer at Phelps Group, a Santa Monica advertising agency that represents such clients as City of Hope, Panasonic and Public Storage. Cohen, 69, came up with some of the most memorable lines in advertising. His commercials are in the Clio Hall of Fame. Pre-roll: Cohen grew up in a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx with the elevated train rattling past his window. His father was in the steel fabrication business, but Cohen was intrigued by advertising.

When Ben Feldman told his parents he had been cast on “Mad Men,” his stepmother couldn't contain herself. “Oh, you're going to be so handsome like the silver-haired guy!” Feldman didn't have the heart then to break the news that his character, the brash, confrontational Jewish junior copywriter Michael Ginsberg, wasn't exactly cut from the same cloth as John Slattery's Roger Sterling or, really, anyone else who had ever appeared on the show. Ginsberg is a new breed. He wears plaid coats with mustard-stained shirts.

If an increasingly common sniff test for political candidates is to pick the one you'd want to have a beer with, then "Mad Men's" Christina Hendricks is well suited to meeting that standard as an Emmy contender. Hendricks, sitting for an interview after breezing through a photo shoot, has a natural ease. It's there in the way she salvages a questioner's bumbling sally about her girlhood as daughter of a National Forest Service employee with her own spin. "I am still ," she says, with the smallest soupçon of irony, "friends with woodchucks.

The Emmys are so predictable … so boring … so uninspired … unless, of course, voters are rewarding your favorite show yet again, and then it's wildly on-target, a well-deserved honor bestowed by perceptive and discriminating industry authorities. FOR THE RECORD: Julia Louis-Dreyfus: The Gold Standard column in the Aug. 9 edition of The Envelope said that Julia Louis-Dreyfus was a 12-time Emmy nominee. The actress has 13 nominations. - Expect a great many predictable (and well-deserved)

The cable creep has finally taken over the Emmys. Making steady inroads over broadcast television in recent years, cable networks dominated the nominations for the coveted top drama category Thursday morning, blanking the major networks by taking five of the six slots - leaving the remaining nomination for public broadcasting. Those drama nominees - "Boardwalk Empire"(HBO), "Breaking Bad"(AMC), "Downton Abbey" (PBS),"Game of Thrones" (HBO),"Homeland" (Showtime) and"Mad Men" (AMC)

When the Emmy nominations were announced Thursday morning, there were plenty of familiar names - the critical darling "Mad Men," for one - but a lesser-known title also made headlines:"American Horror Story. " In fact, "Mad Men" and "American Horror Story" earned the most nominations - 17 each - but the latter is competing in the miniseries and not the drama category. FX contends that the program, which featured 12 episodes, is a miniseries because its first and second seasons will have no relationship to each other and feature different plots, settings and actors.

I am writing this on the eve, or rather the very early morning, of the release of the Emmy nominations. It is 12:24 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time and soon -- soon enough that many nominees will be awakened with the news -- the names of the finalists will be made public. I am writing this now, as a pre-announcement non-reaction, because it doesn't matter to me who is nominated for an Emmy or is not nominated for an Emmy. One can, to be sure, make sometimes interesting generalizations about the direction of the medium from who the voters are noticing this year, as when premium cable and then basic cable programs began to be nominated, presaging their growing importance in the big picture that is television.

AMC may be most closely identified with the glamourous stylings of "Mad Men," but from the looks of its new reality series "Small Town Security," the channel is going as far from the pretty people of 1960s New York as you can get. The unscripted series, set to premiere after"Breaking Bad"on July 15, follows the exploits of the employees of JJK Security, a family-run security and private investigation company in Ringgold, Ga. Based on the...