Correction: There was a miscommunication between Vulture’s reporter and Rich Sommer. Our reporter thought she was asking about Mad Men’s MLK assassination episode, and Sommer thought we were talking about the prior episode in which he and Joan faced off, as he made clear today via Twitter. The accuracy of our reports is important to us, and we sincerely apologize for the incorrect headline (“Rich Sommer Defends Harry Crane’s Reaction to Martin Luther King Jr.’s Assassination”) and information. The original item remains below, though we have changed the headline.
On last week’s Mad Men, “The Flood,” Pete and Harry shared a tense moment over Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination: Harry was going on and on about how the tragedy impacted TV ad space; Pete, for once a moral compass, reminded him it was “a shameful, shameful day.” How does Rich Sommer defend his character’s insensitive, if not totally racist, reaction to King’s death? “Listen, Harry went about it in a bad way, but, other than that, nothing he said was inaccurate,” he told Vulture at last night’s Lucille Lortel Awards. “I mean, he was all entirely factual. So it was hard for me to be mad at him. It was a sort of crime of passion the way he did it, but he’s — you know, he’s not wrong. He just did it the wrong way.”
