I watched the season premier of MAD MEN last night and something struck me; Harry Crane is the Abed of MAD MEN, in that I feel he is always off screen having his own adventures. I’ll bet that we have been deprived of any number of car chases and gun fights by not following his mad cap action. Which got me thinking; what if Harry Crane was actually a CIA agent, working behind the scenes to make sure that no Red influence works its way into advertising. And what if Ken Cosgrove was his handler, sending him off on secret missions, while a team of interns secretly handle all the tedious bits of being a TV Ad Exec. And what if there is an alternate reality where MAD MEN creator Matthew Weiner wrote an early draft of the pilot that focused on CIA agent Crane, and decided that would make a better show than some stuffy drama about people screwing around in the 50’s. Imagine the show we could have gotten…
