At this point in his career, Jon Hamm has a slew of awards nominations and even a few wins, mostly courtesy of his stint on AMC’s long-running prestige drama Mad Men. However, back in 2008, Mad Men was a relatively new player on the scene, and while Jon Hamm was receiving admirable reviews regarding his performance as Don Draper, Jon Hamm wasn’t a household name just yet. Case in point: when he actually won the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Television Series in the drama category, the awards committee spelled his name incorrectly. Instead of spelling it correctly like we’ve done in this article, they called him “John Hamm.”
I suppose things could have been worse and the Golden Globes could have spelled his last name just like a popular meat, but Jon Hamm also told Variety the exchange with the Hollywood Foreign Press was a little awkward.
I was like, ‘Oh man. Uh, guys, there’s no ‘H.’
Jon Hamm didn’t reveal whether or not the Hollywood Foreign Press Association fixed the flub, but you would think they would have had to in order to save face. Otherwise Hamm still has an awards shelf with one Golden Globe sticking out like a sore thumb, as his name is spelled wrong. I bet he has that one hidden in the back, if that’s the case. On the bright side, the Golden Globes sort-of made it up to him this winter, when Jon Hamm won the award for Best Actor in a Television Series—Drama, for the second time. I'm assuming this time the coordinators got the actor's name right.
It’s fitting that Hamm won both near the beginning of Mad Men’s run and after the final episode had aired on AMC. While Mad Men was never a huge ratings juggernaut, the show ushered in a whole new era of original programming on cable. It was an early pioneer in prestige TV and, while cable had some original programming prior to Mad Men's launch, it was much harder for regular cable channels to earn nods from awards committees, including the Hollywood Foreign Press. Plus, even if you never physically watched an episode of Mad Men, doubtless you know who Jon Hamm is as well as the character he portrayed for seven seasons.
You expect that sort of recognition to happen when you are the lead on a wildly popular show like The Big Bang Theory or Game of Thrones, but like Don Draper himself, Mad Men was a product of its age and time, coming up in the world just at the right time to gain wide recognition even with only a moderate audience. In the years following, other cable stations sought to attempt the original programming lineups AMC and FX were both pioneering at the time. Nowadays, a lot of originals on cable channels and even subscription cable channels earn more notice at awards ceremonies like The Golden Globes and the Emmy Awards. Doubtless names like Jon Hamm are spelled correctly in this day and age, although I suppose it’s possible a flub or two still happens now and again.
