You'd think that as a television critic, the last thing Andrew Johnston would want to do with his free time is critique television. But that's exactly what the Time Out New York editor does along with his friend Matt Seitz, purveyor of The House Next Door.

"He started the website as an outlet for more in-depth criticism than he could do at his day job," Johnston says of Seitz, who at the time was the TV critic for the Newark Star-Ledger. "We've been friends for about 10 years, so it was inevitable that sooner or later I'd write something for him." That inevitability surfaced with the premiere of Mad Men, a show Johnston sampled because of his love for Matthew Weiner's work on The Sopranos, and then vigorously pursued because of his fascination with the politics and culture the show portrayed. "The pilot made it instantly clear that every episode was going to have enough heft and substance to warrant an in-depth weekly write-up," he says. "Hardly anybody I knew had heard much about Mad Men, and the episodes I'd seen were clearly something special -- I really wanted to evangelize for the show."

Over the course of the season, Johnston's "Mad Men Fridays" reviews on The House Next Door combined the usual episode recaps and critiques with an analysis of the show's historical accuracy -- "fact-checking," as he puts it -- and its references to real events and trends. When Rachel Mencken mentions Adolf Eichmann's arrest in Argentina, for example, Johnston traced mentions of dates in the dialogue to find the exact date the episode took place, and learned that while she might have known of his arrest, the location it took place was not released to the public until several weeks later.

Johnston's meticulousness when it comes to analyzing the show parallels Weiner's own attention to detail. Each of his reviews end with a litany of "grab-bag" observations, from noting the timeline accuracy of Kodak's Carousel campaign to pointing out the use of the modern rock group The Decemberists on the soundtrack to Episode 9: "Shoot." "I guess it's possible my reviews are a little geekier than some of what's out there because of my nerdy obsession with internal consistency," Johnston admits. But if that's the case, then he's found an equally geeky audience at The House Next Door -- the sort of people for whom the more thorough something is, the better. "They're a really passionate crowd," he says. "And wanting to keep their interest kept me on my toes and made sure I wasn't getting sloppy."

The House Next Door has been quiet on the Mad Men front since the season finale. Says Johnston, "The second season can't come soon enough."