The historians at “Mad Men” pride themselves on getting things right, but on Sunday night, they made a mistake so glaring, fans immediately flooded social-media Web sites to correct them.
It was just a throwaway line, but it was so wrong.
Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks) asks a visiting friend if she wanted Harris to make a reservation for the two of them at Le Cirque. This season of the show is set in 1968, but Sirio Maccioni did not open his landmark Midtown restaurant until 1974.
It wasn’t the first boo-boo made by the media’s favorite show. Last season’s first episode, set in 1966, featured Dusty Springfield singing “The Look of Love.” Discerning critics who saw an advance copy of the show pointed out that Springfield’s rendition of the song wasn’t released until 1967, and creator Matthew Weiner substituted another song by the time it aired on AMC.
In its six years on the air, “Mad Men” has given rise to a cottage industry of extremely devoted fans who keep a record of the show’s mistakes. And ShareTV.com keeps a list of trivia that includes:
* Once, when the brain trust at Sterling Cooper was tasked with finding the right slogan for Lucky Strike, all they could come up was “It’s toasted,” a line used in 1947. The actual slogan from the 1960s was “Lucky Strike separates the men from the boys, but not from the girls.”
* In another episode, a secretary is seen typing on an IBM Selectric II — a machine that wasn’t available until 1971.
* Sometimes, the sets are wrong. When Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) went to a doctor’s office to go on The Pill, the wall calendar behind her read March 1960.
Oops! The first birth-control pill wasn’t approved by the FDA until that May.