Before Mad Men, Jon Hamm Made His Mark On TV With A Taraji P. Henson Crime Series

Jon Hamm's career-defining turn came as the mysterious ad man Don Draper on "Mad Men." It's a role that looms so large over his career that Hamm has since played off his Don persona many times (subtly or otherwise). But there was a period before "Mad Men" where Hamm was not yet a household name, and it was Lifetime that saw his star potential first.

In 2002, Hamm joined the cast of "The Division," a Lifetime procedural show about a mostly-female police squad in San Francisco. Hamm became a series regular in season 2, playing the cynical, shaggy-haired Inspector Nate Basso. The character was so well-liked by the show's writers and fans that he ended up sticking around for the rest of the series.

In a 2015 interview with the Television Academy Foundation, Hamm reflected on his first major TV role and how it got his foot in the door:

"'The Division' was my first series regular job. Me and Taraji Henson, in fact, who's having a moment now. Taraji and I were cast as kind of replacements for the second season of 'The Division,' and then worked for three seasons on that show, which was another kind of incredible learning experience, being one of the leads of an ensemble show, but still one of the leads and knowing you're going to have a job year in and year out, which was pretty great. For the first time, I'd had some kind of stability and security in my career, in my life."

Taraji P. Henson played Inspector Raina Washington. Much like how Hamm would blow up in the years that followed, Henson went on to star in the Oscar-winning "Curious Case of Benjamin Button," in addition to landing a lead role on the hit Fox series "Empire."

"The Division" performed well in the ratings at first, but it was never a major phenomenon. In the years since, it's been so neglected that it's about as hard to find on streaming nowadays as "Mr. & Mrs. Smith," a little-known '90s series that was canceled after less than one season. Still, it taught Hamm some valuable lessons, like how to deal with major cast shakeups in a TV show. 

"The woman who played my [first] partner on the show, Tracy Needham, still a very good friend of mine, was written off the show two seasons in, so I had to kind of deal with losing a friend, so to speak, and then working on kind of the new dynamic on the show," Hamm explained to the Television Academy Foundation. "That was an eye-opener in many ways, about the business of how television works in its most mercenary sense." The same thing happened on "Mad Men," as characters were sometimes abruptly written out (let's pour one out for Salvatore Romano) or suddenly saw their scenes with Hamm reduced (like what happened with January Jones as Don's wife-turned-ex-wife Betty).

Most importantly, "The Division" showed Hamm that success comes in surprising forms — that and he didn't need to land roles on established prestige series from the likes of HBO to make an impression. As he noted to The Hollywood Reporter in 2015, AMC wasn't known for its prestige TV when "Mad Men" came around in the 2000s, but he took a chance on it anyway:

"[AMC] didn't do programming; they just showed old movies. But the last show that I was on with any regularity was on Lifetime, so it wasn't like I had some network bias. Work's work."