In Sunday's episode I noticed that just about every time a television was shown, the picture on the sets would "flip" all the time, making it look like a piece of movie film was very slowly moving from one frame to the next.  (Before someone says it, this is just a comparison to what it looked like - I know they didn't use film.)

I was just wondering if anyone who watched television in that era can attest to the image being finicky like they depicted it on Mad Men.  I realize it was still a relatively new medium at the time, so I imagine they still had all kinds of bugs to work out, but were the ones we saw common?

The TV in Harry's office, the Draper's, Pete and Trudy's...I remember seeing it on all of them.

White Bread, I noticed that, too, and thought they were overdoing it.  In fact, I don't remember that happening at all.  What I do remember is the screen going to "snow" and my father going up to the roof all the time to adjust the antenna.  The funny thing is I don't ever remember him complaining about it.  In 1963 we had a TV with a "remote".  The wire ran across the living room carpet to the couch.  When you pushed the button, the big knob on the TV physically moved.  So primitive.  My mom yelled at me for pushing the button too often because I was going to break it.

My father was a salesman for RCA televisions at the time and my uncle was a tv repairman for Sears, so I'm well acquainted with the picture problems. The "flip and roll" were common. As jackspratt mentioned, it usually wasn't the sets themselves, but the antenna reception. Most sets in those days had "rabbit ears" that could be notoriusly finicky. The picture you received depended on conditions such as line-of-sight or distance of the transmitter towers, foul weather, sunspots, brown-outs, etc. Manhattan, with all its tall buildings, was terrible for broadcast reception. Don's house way out in the suburbs probably suffered from distance. Also, televisions in those days had about a dozen or more vacuum tubes inside them, that could produce any number of problems when they were on their way out. I remember my father pulling the back off the tv at least every other month to swap out tubes and other troubleshooting.

And again, during this episode they were watching "live" news broadcasts that were actually shot by video cameras (primitive by todays standards), not film cameras. So even at the time, images were grainy at best.