Jon Hamm's TV Masterpiece With Over 15 Emmys Is Hitting HBO Max Very Soon

Huge news for fans of "Mad Men," the critically adored AMC series created by Matthew Weiner — it's finally coming to a "mainstream" streamer, so to speak. As of December 1, "Mad Men" will be available to stream on HBO Max, and as a particularly cool bonus, it'll stream in 4K.

Up until this point, "Mad Men" — which ran from 2007 to 2015 and spanned 7 seasons and 92 episodes — was only available to stream on AMC+, the official streamer of its original home network, so it's great news that the show will be available to a much wider audience in a little over a month. In a press release sent to Looper, Royce Battleman, the EVP of global content acquisitions at Warner Bros. Discovery, said, "'Mad Men' is a great addition to the HBO Max library of iconic content. We are thrilled that HBO Max will provide fans the opportunity to enjoy the series in a fresh way with an enhanced 4K viewing experience."

Jim Packer, the president of worldwide TV distribution at Lionsgate, agreed, saying, "'Mad Men' continues to show truly remarkable staying power with audiences a full decade after concluding its network run, and we couldn't imagine a better home for it than HBO Max. HBO sets the bar for premium entertainment, making it the perfect place to celebrate one of television's defining series while introducing 'Mad Men' to new viewers and reintroducing it to longtime fans in 4K."

Not only is this a huge get for HBO Max's expansive catalog, which is already home to HBO classics like "The Sopranos" and "Game of Thrones" and other acquisitions like "The Big Bang Theory" and "Gossip Girl," but this is really big news for fans of "Mad Men." If you're unfamiliar with the show as a whole, here's a refresher.

After working on "The Sopranos" as a writer and executive producer, Matthew Weiner took his storytelling talents to New York City in the 1960s for "Mad Men," which centers around an advertising firm in Manhattan. One of that firm's ad guys, the handsome but overtly awful Don Draper — played by Jon Hamm — serves as the show's focus, bringing us into the firm that, at the beginning, is named Sterling Cooper as well as Don's home life, where he's raising two children with his former model wife Betty Draper (January Jones). At work, Don comes up with pitches alongside the firm's partner Roger Sterling (a stellar John Slattery), oversees underling executives like Pete Campbell (Victor Kartheiser), and watches as his secretary Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) rises from that role into becoming a genuinely great ad saleswoman in her own right.

Throughout the ten years in which "Mad Men" takes place, the audience watches as real historical events — like the assassination of President John F. Kennedy Jr. — unfold for the characters and as the culture around them radically shifts, with people like Don often needing to catch up to the times (especially when he divorces Betty and marries the much younger Megan, played by Jessica Paré). If you haven't watched "Mad Men," you should definitely check it out when it arrives on HBO Max, because it's incredible; sure, the subject matter sounds a little dry at face value, but "Mad Men" can be hysterically funny, deeply emotional, and even shocking (and sometimes, it can be all of these things at once).

Ironically, HBO once passed on "Mad Men," so it's particularly interesting that the show is coming to this specific streamer. (According to a 2009 article about the show's success in Vanity Fair, then-CEO of HBO Richard Plepler wanted David Chase, who worked with Matthew Weiner on "The Sopranos," to serve as an executive producer if HBO agreed to pick up the series. Chase declined, HBO passed, and the rest, as they say, is history.) These days, "Mad Men" is, without question, one of the most acclaimed and lauded shows of its era — it picked up a whopping 16 Emmys, including four for outstanding drama series alone — and interestingly, it ran alongside another major AMC shows that helped define this time in TV history.

That show, obviously, is "Breaking Bad," yet another show that HBO passed on before it found a home at AMC. Vince Gilligan's epic tale of a high school chemistry teacher who starts making crystal meth — played by Bryan Cranston, who spent years at the Emmys beating out Jon Hamm for outstanding actor in a drama series until Hamm finally triumphed for the final season of "Mad Men" — helped usher in a golden age of television alongside "Mad Men," with these two radically different but wholly excellent shows becoming huge hits for AMC and racking up awards nominations and wins. 

You'll be able to watch all of "Mad Men" in remastered 4K on HBO Max on December 1, so go ahead and watch (or rewatch!) the entire series once it starts streaming.