The internet is thrilled that our favorite Madison Avenue men (also known as, you guessed it, Mad Men) are back on our TV screens in a big way with HBO Max bringing the new 4K transfer of the entire series to its platform — but it turns out it made a glaring visual error in doing so.
In the last couple of days, fans have noticed — and IGN has verified — that the HBO Max version of an episode in Season 1 includes a shot in which John Slattery’s character Roger Sterling throws up in the office, but you can also see crew members operating a puke machine with tubes behind himt. Yeah, it immediately takes the audience out of the immersion of the show, but it’s funny nonetheless.
Confirming that you can see a crew member adjusting Roger’s puke stream in the new 4k rip of Mad Men on HBO Max. pic.twitter.com/G8mlX07633
— IGN (@IGN) December 2, 2025
“The new 4K transfer of Mad Men on HBO somehow does not have any of the post-production edits added in,” one fan highlighted alongside a screenshot of the error on Twitter/X, where the post received over 19,000 likes and 740,000 views. “Which means you get stuff like this where you can see the crew member manning the puke machine after Roger has too many oysters lmao.”
The mistake was also featured on the Mad Men subreddit, where fans speculated that the post-production team must have forgotten to edit the crew members out of the shot and that the powers that be potentially used this version of the shot instead of the edited one.
Interestingly enough, the episode that contains the error is also mislabeled on the platform. The incident in question with Sterling’s vomit happens in the seventh episode of the first season, titled Red in the Face. But you’ll find the mistake in the episode prior, titled Babylon, on HBO Max for some reason.
Production snafus like this are not all that uncommon in Hollywood, and there have been some famous ones over the years. My favorite is the final season error in Game of Thrones, where a Starbucks cup sits blatantly on a table in frame next to Emilia Clarke’s character Daenerys Targaryen in Episode 4. Back in 2023, crew was accidentally visible filming the snowy landscape around them during an overhead shot for The Last of Us — so these issues, they do come up.
Regardless of the error, Mad Men is an excellent show and it’s now available to stream in 4K on HBO Max, so get on it.
Lex Briscuso is a film and television critic and a freelance entertainment writer for IGN. You can follow her on Twitter at @nikonamerica.
