The Middleman

AMC; Disney/Pixar; Eike Schroter/ABC Family Sunday night's Mad Men featured yet more Miss Blankenship, Don's new dottie secretary. She's funny and all — although honestly, she's a little much for me — but I felt like I've seen her before. Because I totally have!  

Of late several major news outlets--among them the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, ABC's 20/20, and PBS's Frontline--have been working their Y-fronts into knots over the presumed problem of payola. Odds are that readers most familiar with this word will be graying baby boomers, and that they will associate it with a national media scandal of the late 1950s and early '60s, in the course of which certain unscrupulous deejays were drummed out of the broadcasting business for accepting bribes from recor  

Of late several major news outlets--among them the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, ABC's 20/20, and PBS's Frontline--have been working their Y-fronts into knots over the presumed problem of payola. Odds are that readers most familiar with this word will be graying baby boomers, and that they will associate it with a national media scandal of the late 1950s and early '60s, in the course of which certain unscrupulous deejays were drummed out of the broadcasting business for accepting bribes from recor