The Wire I will agree is "bland" in the sense I'm using here. And indeed, I don't think the The Wire would have been a good show to establish a network, even th

The Wire I will agree is "bland" in the sense I'm using here. And indeed, I don't think the The Wire would have been a good show to establish a network, even though it was good. That's a good example of the sort of thing I'm talking about here. I really don't mean the show is bad. I mean that shows that "make" networks tend to be obviously quirky, and this show doesn't seem to have that trait. But IMO Mad Men was actually a pretty high-concept show. It was readily identifiable even to people who weren't very familiar with it. (I say this as someone who actually didn't watch Mad Men for several years and thus was actually in that position.)