This Is Jon Hamm's Secret Strategy To Cameo On Every TV Show By The End Of 2018

For a show with its title, The Last Man On Earth has never had any problem adding members to its population. But viewers have come to expect, by now, not to get too attached to any new face. The second (...ultimately first and only) Phil didn't survive amateur surgery; Mike has possibly succumbed to the plague that wiped out the rest of humanity. But as the series launches its third season, we're learning that the bigger the star, the faster he'll go. Remember how surprising and fun it was to see Will Ferrell, as Gordon, enjoying a Malibu sing-along with the rest of the survivors who didn't hate Tandy?

Oh well.

History repeats itself in the Season 3 premiere as Melissa, freed from the stocks, goes straight back for her shotgun to address the issue of three intruders.

It's certainly more permanent damage than Tandy was likely to inflict with his weapon of choice or convenience: a rod full of "players" from a foosball table. But maybe Melissa would have held her fire had she seen her target's face.

It's a meta-moment that reaches back through TV history: who could ever forget the memorable introduction of January Jones's Betty Draper, using a shotgun to deal with intruding birds on Mad Men?

But it's also not the first time Jon Hamm, formerly Jones's Mad Men husband Don, has popped into a sitcom just to make a (heartbreakingly) swift exit. When Parks & Recreation closed its penultimate season with a flash-forward to Leslie's leadership of a Pawnee-based office of the National Parks Service, Hamm was there to play one of her reports, Ed. Unfortunately for us all, Ed was a worse employee even than Jerry, and just when we'd gotten excited about the prospect of watching that perfect mug in Pawnee, he became one of the few employees Leslie ever gave up on reforming, and she fired him.

And earlier this year, when Angie Tribeca needed to establish that Geils had been working with another partner during Angie's post-bombing coma and immediately depart for the season as we learn Angie's woken up, guess who was up for another micro-cameo?

Would TV be better if every sitcom were like Wet Hot American Summer: First Day Of Camp or Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt or Childrens Hospital, locking Jon Hamm into multi-episode arcs? Yes, OF COURSE, what a STUPID QUESTION. But there are only so many hours in a day and Jon Hamm can't risk overworking that moneymaker of his. Let's just all be grateful he owes favours so many showrunners that he can lend it out a few hours at a time.