The 2014 Emmy Awards are upon us! Will your favorite TV stars win? Will you yell at the TV when they don’t? All bets are off. See the nominees before they were dressed to the nines to pick up that Emmy statuette.

Grab your band uniform and start practicing your comebacks, because school is back in session. You might be surprised at some of the A-listers who suffered the wrath of mean girls and bullies, but the teasing they survived may be part of the secret to their success.

Time to put on that lip ring and dust off that copy of Donnie Darko while you fire up some punk metal! Before these celebs were famous—and glamour-pusses on the red carpet— they had donned goth clothes, punky hair, and some seriously alternative looks. Now excuse us while we put on The Cure and curl up into the fetal position.

It’s better to have lost and loved than never to have loved a brilliant, genre-bending, beautifully written show at all. Joss Whedon’s scifi-Western Firefly lasted less than a season on Fox, but its impact has far outlived the series. The cast reunited briefly in 2005 for the movie Serenity, but for devoted fans—like us—there just wasn’t enough of what was, for a time, the smartest, most original show on television.

Time to buy some nicotine gum and welcome the final season of AMC’s award-winning drama Mad Men. Snakkle couldn’t resist taking a look back on what these stylish lads and ladies looked like before they were stars.