Did AMC Interrupt Mad Men to Bash Dish?

The war between Dish Network and AMC Networks may have taken another casualty Sunday night -- the poor, helpless Mad Men fan.

According to The Los Angeles Times, AMC ran an ad during the final minute of Mad Men's season finale alerting Dish subscribers that they would soon lose the channel. Times writer Ben Fritz, a Dish subscriber, said the ad urged Dish customers to switch to DIRECTV.

Fritz writes that the ad eliminated about half a minute of the final scene.

"I mean that in the middle of a scene, an ad suddenly appeared and encouraged me to visit www.keepamc.com, an anti-Dish website sponsored by the network. When it ended and Mad Men picked up, it was clear that I had lost 15 or 30 seconds of the scene," Fritz says.

AMC and Dish are engaged in a heated dispute over a new programming pact with Dish threatening to drop AMC and its two sister networks, WE TV and IFC, at the end of the month. Last week after AMC ran a commercial during Mad Men (in the commercial break, however; not during the show itself), Dish moved AMC to a different channel number without telling its subscribers.

Fritz asked AMC why the ad aired and the network replied that it would never run an ad during an actual scene in the show. But the Times reporter said Dish's Facebook page was loaded with comments from subscribers saying they had seen the same thing.

"Maybe it's the TV business equivalent of black ops: Something dirty is going on, but whoever did it has committed themselves to plausible deniability," Fritz lamented in The Times.

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Phillip Swann is president and publisher of TVPredictions.com. He has been quoted in dozens of publications and broadcast outlets, including CNN, Fox News, Inside Edition, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, The Financial Times, The Associated Press and The Hollywood Reporter. He can be reached at swann@tvpredictions.com or at 703-505-3064.

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