can we talk about MAD MEN on AMC?

Is it really any good? I was vaguely interested but...AMC!

I know! the channel that shows independence day over and over again as a classic!

nevertheless...it was really tremendously good. give it a chance!

Seems like it's trying to be the American Life on Mars, kinda.

everyones sexist, racist, smoking their asses off and drinking at their job, whats not to like? looks great too, a great-looking show this is

I like things about ad men

Saw this show for the first time tonight. FANTASTIC.

Impeccable design, at least a few scenes as strong as prime-grade Sopranos.

I love that I don't recognize these actors at all, so they're just the characters to me.

you guys are shitting me, right? I hate this show and the stupid ads where they pretend like they're so clever. The lead is so fucking stiff and everyone recites the dialogue like they're reading Shakespeare in high school. BOO

It's 1959, of course he's stiff! Get a drink or two in him and he loosens up, like the rest.

i think it's a lot of fun. some of the "look how people used to behave" stuff is heavy-handed, but mostly it works, and it's balanced by the characters. it's a good era to look back at, right on the cusp of lots of things. and everything looks so good.

heard an interview w/ the creator on a re-run of "Fressshhhh Air" last night. It sounds like it could be pretty interesting and the guy did a damn fine job of describing/ selling his aesthetic. But the couple of clips they played sounded kinda blah.

Of course, what can you really tell from audio clips of a tv show? I'm sure bits from the Sopranos would sound just as blah over the radio, esp. if you weren't familiar with the show.

I really like this show.

the couple of clips they played sounded kinda blah.

well there's not a lot of action or anything. mostly people sitting around talking. but it's interesting anyway. the idea is basically to sketch an era (from the perspectives of our own, of course), so every little scene contributes to the bigger picture. i like how ambitious it is -- they're angling to bring the nixon-kennedy race into the picture, and who knows what else. i'm definitely hooked enough to watch the whole first season. i hope there will be more.

well it wasn't so much the lack of action as the dialogue and delivery. But again, without actually seeing it I should reserve judgement.

i've seen one episode and it was impressive!

pretty amazing look at office life pre-feminism and pre-technology, it's like another planet.

some of the "look how people used to behave" stuff is heavy-handed

I caught a bit of it and yeah this was a little off-putting, it seemed very self-satisfied, no subtlety.

pretty amazing look at office life pre-feminism and pre-technology, it's like another planet.

this made me think of Wilder's "The Apartment", which is probably 10x better than this will ever be...

some of the "look how people used to behave" stuff is heavy-handed

this is kind of what I was thinking.

or I should say, what I could easily see happening.

I will refrain from posting any more on this thread until I've seen it.

the heavy-handedness is less off-putting if you consider the show as a kind of comedy, which i think it is (or at least a comic drama). those moments -- the pregnant mom smoking and drinking, the kids scrambling around the car without seatbelts, the casual anti-semitism -- are gags of a sort, and they're kind of funny.

(i mean, i laughed when the one guy smacked the other guy's kid, and the other guy's only response was to threaten to smack the kid again.)

I agree that such moments are intended as comedy, but to me they're a little too obvious and smug.

(by smug I mean that the comedy is rooted in having a feeling of superiority - primarily of an ethical and behavioral nature - over the characters. Its kinda mean and simplistic).

Sopranos does the same thing with its characters - often having them doing/saying unbelievably stupid and/or cruel things to one another - but there the comic trick was subtler, because it was always offset by conscious efforts to make the characters as sympathetic as possible.

i think the characters here have some depth and complexity. none of them are completely unsympathetic (except minor characters, like pete campbell's horrible father and the man from bethlehem steel). and presumably more of them will be fleshed out as it goes along. (the closeted graphic designer, e.g., is just a type right now but i'm guessing he'll get some episodes to himself.)

partly i like the similarities to far from heaven, because i kind of fantasized about following the characters in that movie over the next decade or so, seeing what happened to them as they went through the '60s, and this show has at least the potential for that. like, what will don draper's 7-year-old daughter be like as a 17-year-old in 1969?

also, i admit i'm mostly enjoying having a weekly show to watch again. i was never a sopranos watcher, so i've been bereft since the 4th season of the wire ended.

(i've only seen the first season of the sopranos, but it took a while for those characters to emerge as more than types too.)

what about the "don draper isn't who he says he is" storyline that's set to emerge? i would have thought that the show had enough dramatic possibility to work with without going into something like that.

the guy who plays draper kind of gave away the game on that one in one of the post-show interviews, didn't he? he said something about draper being from a real hardscrabble, orphaned background. i didn't get the sense he's so much "living a lie!!" or anything, just that he doesn't talk about it. but maybe there's more to it.

(draper would make sense as a G.I.-bill striver)

oh, no - there's definitely more to it. in the 2nd episode he was recognized on the train by an army buddy who called him by a different name, and in the preview for next week's ep someone from his past shows up exclaiming "i can't believe it. it's really you!" or words to that effect.

oh yeah i forgot that bit on the train. well hopefully they won't make it anything too stupid.

My prediction? Draper = Gatsby

HE'S THE RUSSIAN FROM SOPRANOS

All I know is that scenes like that one near the end about WWII-era guys drinking vs. Korea-era guys drinking is why I watch TV or read books or see plays, as much or more so than the plots.

And I thought the subtleties of the Bethlehem Steel pitch and the mock-ups worked well, too. The idea that the junior guy wasn't adding much to what was there already, but he came up with a word and metaphor, backbone, that convinced the guy.

And, come on, guys sitting around smoking and listening to a Bob Newhart record!

so the secret-identity stuff was handled ok. i liked the way the episode ended. and the relationship dialogue in the show is good, like the way don's wife feels him out about buying summer home and he demurs and she says something like, "good, i like seeing my father."

Pimpin' aint easy.

Should I torrent this, Americans?

oh yeah the pete campbell thing. like "you fucked him before, now you can fuck him for me." sweet.

xpost: sure. it's pretty good.

I haven't seen last night's episode, but last week's was really fantastic. I liked how they managed to show the position of the blueblood junior ad exec from multiple angles which made the final scene where he's looking out over the skyline seeing that from his vantage point the city is ostensibly his even though he knows he's completely mediocre and unworthy.

Also, divorced mom's kid is delightfully weird.

he's a big jew obviously!

this show could be so much better. all the wife-in-therapy stuff... i mean.. really? already? they should really have pulled an ER and just shown the working world, it's SO much more interesting. as it stands they don't really do that stuff too well either.

and all that divorced-mom-with-volkswagen stuff is so pandering. yes we know times were changing.

yeah, fair criticism. i like it anyway.

So far I've watched an episode and a half- pretty good. Like a Rock Hudson-Doris Day movie crossed with the seedy opening love of Pyscho with accompanying Saul Bass opening credits.

I was kinda hoping that for historical accuracy the Greenwich Village club scene would have an extra dressed up as Moondog and another as Tiny Tim.

"It's like watching a dog play the piano." Wow.

I like this show. I enjoyed the fact that the tone of the show holds the beatniks in as much contempt as the soulless ad men. My fear is that it will become message-oriented, askew its historical climate and not allow the characters to wallow in their sexism, racism and homophobia--that they will learn their lesson about diversity. I want to see them "learn" their lesson only insofar as it allows them to make more money and become more attuned ad men. Really, in my mind, this setting is the birth scene of the new right in America.

whats up with the redhead secretary saying "you know what they say, the medium is the message"? did that phrase exist in 1960?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

The phrase was coined by McLuhan in his 1964 book, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man.

It's anticipatory plagiarism, like Leo DiCaprio saying "Freedom's just another word for nothing left to lose in Titanic.

all seven episodes running in marathon this weekend.

I want to like this show, it's very pretty to look at, and the city and the office almost take on the quality of a fable. But there's not a single character or even a single line of dialogue in any of the episodes I've seen that makes it seem even vaguely interesting beyond that. MAYBE the jewish department store heiress, but since she only ever interacts with Draper (the sociopath in the dishwater suit) it's all cancelled out. Pete and Dan are more pathetic than anything. I know this character arc, they both get cancer in their fifties and their children don't miss them when they die.

The monologue about why post-Depression guys drink vs. post-WW II guys is one of many scenes that are as good as stage drama or Sopranos.

ha, ok

that delivery of "everyone's gotta be something" was pretty don draperish

was kinda shocked to learn that Jon Hamm is a year younger than me when dude looks like 10 years older

Doesn't it seem like most images of midcentury American 35-year-olds now look about 50 to our eyes? Maybe this explains why most of our movie stars are overgrown boys? (Cruise, DiCaprio, Hanks, Pitt etc)

Hanks is an overgrown boy with a receding hairline though.

None of those guys resemble boys to me except maybe DiCaprio.

Anyway, just started watching today (S1E1) and I could definitely see getting into it, but some of the winking "LOL, 1960!" bits are way more overstated than I'd have liked.

Yeah Dicaprio/Depp both have that hard to believe they have to shave look.

http://www.todayandtomorrow.net/2009/08/20/mad-men-bmw-ad/

looks pretty white to me

Anyway, just started watching today (S1E1) and I could definitely see getting into it, but some of the winking "LOL, 1960!" bits are way more overstated than I'd have liked.

― irreconcilable aesthetic criteria (Eric H.), Thursday, August 20, 2009 9:40 PM (4 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

honestly i can totally see this show being pretty o_O seemingly indefensible for the first few episodes. you struggle to look for a kind of moral baseline or handhold into this world, struggling to figure out exactly what the show is trying to tell you.

anyone (jhoshea) who acts like the brilliance is self-evident minutes into watching yr first episode is nuts

its obv the show is amazing from the 1st ep - then it just gets better - lol 60s complaints are purely fools desperately searching for a critical angle

― ice cr?m, Friday, November 28, 2008 8:27 AM (8 months ago) Bookmark

awful post

Hey tonight's episode was much better than the premiere! Sigh of relief, here.

i started avoiding this thread once i saw where it was going, but i came back to it tonight because i couldn't sleep. yikes, guys.

anyway, here's why mad men is interesting to me, personally, once i move the cool '60s "window dressing" aside.

for some reason, rich conservative white people continue to fascinate me, even though (or because?) i'm tired of their pop-cultural predominance, and sense of social entitlement, and ability to grab national headlines when they do something as quotidian as "disappear" or "get murdered." i am a white person, of eastern-european jewish extraction. i always check off "white, non-hispanic" on forms. i'm well aware it's much much much easier for me to "pass" in that way than for a poc. plus, i'm generally well-schooled (public mostly), and i like to believe i'm better at cocktail parties than any of those country club protestant fucktards on the show.

but i still feel like an outsider in america. i'm a non-christian (like rachel menken), an outer-borough girl from scrappy immigrant stock (like peggy), and my political views are left-of-center (uh, like that kennedy-supporting neighbor that betty hated). i watch the show because the "old rich white guy" stuff is both foreign to me and all too familiar, and i want the outsider-ish types to poke through those glass ceilings, whether or not they "deserve to." i want to see the aristocracy start to crumble and i believe that some day it can finish crumbling and we won't have any more snippy anti-sotomayor sorta crap from those circles.

of course a lot of americans are from scrappy immigrant stock, but many QUOTE UNQUOTE REAL AMERICANS conveniently forget their ancestry.

Anyone know where I can find a t*rr*nt of yesterday's episode? Doesn't appear to be on Isohunt.

what is the deal is no one t*rr*nting this

good episode

I have never seen Bye Bye Birdie, was that clip from a credit sequence or something?

also lolz how badly does Don want a dad

the scene when peggy was singing to herself in the mirror...

anybody figure out the significance of don touching the grass when watching the teacher dance around the pole with the kids?

he wants to smoke grass... while the teacher dances around his "pole" (dick)

barefoot-grass-pagan spring ritual-rebirth

eh who knows

(mostly I was thinking "jesus Don don't bang yr kids' teacher")

btw the scene w/ bettys dad pouring the booze down the sink was imo 10000000000000X better a way to inject some sense of historical continuity than all the depression-era flashbacks

he's getting ideas for the patio diet soda ad campaign. (xpost, what shakey said.)

yeah tbh I was expecting the last scene with him and Peggy to be a pitch for the Patio thing but then it just.. ended

yeah, i got that too. i think he was getting the same feeling he got from the BBB clip. but what was the significance of him coming to work and staring at peggy, though?

does he agree with her now about the direction the campaign should go?

Apparently the Browning poem this episode references provides some insight, but I have too much work to do right now to verify that claim.

ann-margret = shrill desperation for a man through the voice of untamed youth

the pagan teacher and the kids = the same untamed youth thing, but people (women) are enjoying themselves and don't NEED anything external to that awesome moment

the underlying message is that they NEED the product because it will make them feel that way for all tiemz, but it sets up a nicely different binary than "a woman is miserable without a man to save her."

Browning poem...? I missed that

Where the quiet-coloured end of evening smiles,
Miles and miles
On the solitary pastures where our sheep
Half-asleep
Tinkle homeward thro' the twilight, stray or stop
As they crop--
Was the site once of a city great and gay,
(So they say)
Of our country's very capital, its prince
Ages since
Held his court in, gathered councils, wielding far
Peace or war.

II.
Now,--the country does not even boast a tree,
As you see,
To distinguish slopes of verdure, certain rills
From the hills
Intersect and give a name to, (else they run
Into one)
Where the domed and daring palace shot its spires
Up like fires
O'er the hundred-gated circuit of a wall
Bounding all,
Made of marble, men might march on nor be pressed,
Twelve abreast.

III.
And such plenty and perfection, see, of grass
Never was!
Such a carpet as, this summer-time, o'erspreads
And embeds
Every vestige of the city, guessed alone,
Stock or stone--
Where a multitude of men breathed joy and woe
Long ago;
Lust of glory pricked their hearts up, dread of shame
Struck them tame;
And that glory and that shame alike, the gold
Bought and sold.

IV.
Now,--the single little turret that remains
On the plains,
By the caper overrooted, by the gourd
Overscored,
While the patching houseleek's head of blossom winks
Through the chinks--
Marks the basement whence a tower in ancient time
Sprang sublime,
And a burning ring, all round, the chariots traced
As they raced,
And the monarch and his minions and his dames
Viewed the games.

V.
And I know, while thus the quiet-coloured eve
Smiles to leave
To their folding, all our many-tinkling fleece
In such peace,
And the slopes and rills in undistinguished grey
Melt away--
That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair
Waits me there
In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul
For the goal,
When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb
Till I come.

VI.
But he looked upon the city, every side,
Far and wide,
All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades'
Colonnades,
All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,--and then,
All the men!
When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,
Either hand
On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace
Of my face,
Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech
Each on each.

VII.
In one year they sent a million fighters forth
South and North,
And they built their gods a brazen pillar high
As the sky,
Yet reserved a thousand chariots in full force--
Gold, of course.
Oh heart! oh blood that freezes, blood that burns!
Earth's returns
For whole centuries of folly, noise and sin!
Shut them in,
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest!
Love is best.

what part of the episode was that ... ?

The title of the episode is the title of that poem.

Can't wait for this to start in the UK, just spoke to Mom and forgot to ask her about further impressions of Uncle Bill's ad agency.

i am surprised at the lack of commenting compared to after the first episode.

i loved, loved, loved episode 2. soooo much great dialogue... and a lot of awkwardness! (Peggy in the mirror, Don talking to Betty's brother, every conversation about MSG)

also, Peggy has legs.

Don talking to Betty's brother

I always love it when Don lays the law on someone.

every conversation about MSG

Paul earned respect 4EVA

lol calling Paul 'the communist'

Don laying down the law on Betty's brother was especially sweet for two reasons.

1. Betty's brother (or was it his wife) saying that Don has no say in the decision.
2. Betty's brother is such a douche.

I really preferred the Don in this episode. He wasn't the same old character that women always fall for, like in the first episode. This was Don being Don. On top of his game at work and then sticking up for Betty. I thought it was a very sweet move, whether it was just a pragmatic move or not. And then being pissed about the MSG account. That is Don Draper.

i liked peggy's assertion of her sexuality, and her control over it. wonder if she's going to go on the pill sometime this season.

every conversation about MSG

Paul earned respect 4EVA

yeah, for sure. the MSG blunder was the beginning of the end of faux-progressive mid-century "urban renewal" in new york. MSG itself did turn out to be a successful economic development engine, but it's largely responsible for how ugly and dumpy-looking that neighborhood looks now. interesting that the show also mentioned the '64/'65 new york world's fair, which would be mean old robert moses' attempt at a last stand, as he was staring his future irrelevance in the face.

wonder if she's going to go on the pill sometime this season.

Didn't that happen in the first episode of the first season?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1bPoSEii2M

Yeah, but we all know how well THAT (going on the pill) turned out. Presumably she let her prescription lapse shortly after giving birth.

Also, I've taken the liberty of starting a whole NEW thread, since this one's gotten pretty damn unwieldy and clusterfucky:

can we talk about MAD MEN on AMC on this NEW thread ('cause the original one's getting way too long)

anyone (jhoshea) who acts like the brilliance is self-evident minutes into watching yr first episode is nuts

― butthurt (deej), Monday, August 24, 2009 4:56 AM (4 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

fyi its harder for stupids to pick up on this sort of thing - thats why we call them stupids (deej)

http://1.media.tumblr.com/JMgEpYg0Pq477ujyDnrUkwMJo1_500.jpg

To bad he can't fucking think.

headline in my school paper's entertainment section: "Mad Men illuminates darker side of '60s culture"

"Mad Men darkens illuminated side of 60's culture"

Really someone needs to lock this thread. This is confusing.

ok