Is Mad Men the best thing on TV?

[SnarkyOracle!]

hopefully not groovy at all

it's at it's worst when it gets all "hey, it's the 60s!"

But that's going to be harder to avoid as they get into the late-'60s, wont it?

As the article points out:

But it will be difficult for the series to meaningfully depict the war while avoiding ’60s caricatures, argues J. Hoberman, author of “The Dream Life: Movies, Media, and the Mythology of the Sixties.” “You see it in every movie, this montage of demonstrators in Washington, soldiers in Vietnam. It's worse than a cliché. It can really work only if the show zeroes in on very specific elements and lets the whole circus be refracted through that.”

[SnarkyOracle!]

Something I complained constantly about in the '80s was the '80s movie and TV fixation on the '60s when the self-absorbed rightist/leftist biases and disingenuousness of the '80s wouldn't allow it to portray any era -- even itself -- honestly or accurately.

Say what??

Anyway, it's nice to see a show today which goes to such great lengths to get the subtleties of the '60s as right as possible... And it would take a Matthew Weiner to do it, as he fundamentally thinks correctly -- or as numerous interviews with him seem to reveal.

I still have issues with it: like the period body language, which the show attempts to capture, yet I'm always aware I'm watching 2000's actresses.

But nothing's ever perfect.

I'm reviewing and enjoying my Season 1 DVD's, and the strengths far outweigh (and almost neutralize) the imperfections. In look and tone, they do as good a job as a modern production probably ever could.

[Scarlett]

Mmmm, I have missed this show soooo much . I've never watched it in what I call 'real-time' as in not on DVD, so it's hard to cope with the off days.

[SnarkyOracle!]

To get some idea of how sick the industry is, at least in America, I was watching an interivew recently with Weiner who said that not only did all of Hollywood turn him and his MAD MEN project down, but that many executives were openly angry with him for bringing something so obviously non-junky to their attention, and that he had more than one executive say point-blank that "only bad things are commercially successful, and that good things always bomb, and that the only exceptions are flukes" (unaware their own acknowledgement of the "fluke" exceptions negated their bitter wisdoms).

So if that's the prevailing cynical insight that runs Hollywood such that they actually phrase it that way, then it's no wonder the business is what it is.

Then an executive AMC greenlighted the project, simply and innocently thinking it sounded like a cool idea. And then it became a hit, or what qualifies as a hit on cable in today's market.

Asked if Weiner held any bitterness towards all the industry executives who'd turned him down and often derided him for his creative idealism while they did so, he said "no" because there'd be no one to work with in the future if he did.

[neighboursfan]

Does anyone know if Mad Men is coming back to BBC2.

[Scarlett]

Asked if Weiner held any bitterness towards all the industry executives who'd turned him down and often derided him for his creative idealism while they did so, he said "no" because there'd be no one to work with in the future if he did.

Smart guy.

[Scarlett]

Been watching S5 and this last episode is so mind-blowing, the biggest one for me this season.

[Garrison]

holy shit holy shit holy shit

those last 10 minutes... the look on Don's face at that meeting, then Peggy(!) and then the look on Joan's face holy sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeit

this season has been transcendent, probably one of the best seasons of television ever made.

Does anyone know if Mad Men is coming back to BBC2.

No, Sky Atlantic only

[Scarlett]

I would disagree with this season being the best compared to others...but last night's eppy was arguably the best of the season. So good you may as well stop the show's season early because nothing is going to top the stuff that went down on Sunday, it would pale in comparison. But then I would still want more Mad Men....two episodes to go.

I am majorly bummed about Elisabeth Moss, though it's great for Peggy to finally move on (how she lasted that long in that hell-hole of a work environment I will never know). The whole Peggy thing eclipses the whole Joan thing in my book (I'm surprised by what Ms. Holloway did, but not flat out outraged - I am seeing a lot of angry feedback for Red). She made a choice, she has a price. She has a family to provide for and now she can. That is unless Lane crushes the whole company.

[MargaretKrebbs]

Season 5 started off rather lackluster for me. While still good, I thought it was having a hard time establishing it's pitch and rhythm. But I'd say from episode 6 on, it is a spectacular season. The show has managed to reinvent itself - no more womanizing Don and he's totally believable in his reincarnation - without resorting to something gimmicky like a hostile takeover or something. Roger Sterling is also evolving. His "trip" was so creatively executed, and so crucial to his mind expansion. The trick is that the essence of these characters is still present, because they were fully created and realized. They were never one dimensional. So when evolution occurs it feels natural and organic and complex, not just plot oriented.

I love watching Peter follow in Don's footsteps and I love Joan's strength. Peggy has grown up and I cannot wait to see what happens to her.

New York Times Arts Blog: May 30, 2012, 3:22 pm
Deconstructing Harry (and Joan and Don): Scholarly Blog Takes on ‘Mad Men’
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLER

Fans of “Mad Men” are used to flocking to venues like ArtsBeat’s “Mad Men Watch” or New York Magazine’s “Mad Men Recap” first thing on Monday mornings to obsessively parse the previous night’s twists and turns. But viewers who find those discussions a bit light on references to Marxist theory and other intellectual heavy artillery now have another place to go.

Since the beginning of Season Five, “Mad World,” a forum at the scholarly Web site Kritik, has been offering a lively if occasionally jargon-heavy discussion of the series, itself intended as an extended trailer for “Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s,” a collection of essays coming from Duke University Press later this year.

The contributors aren’t the first academic types to problematize, interrogate and otherwise analyze the series, which has also inspired courses at Northwestern and Berkeley as well as at least one scholarly podcast. But they may be among the most willing to use terms like “diagetic.”

Here’s Todd McGowan, an associate professor of film at the University of Vermont, on Peggy’s decision at the end of Sunday’s episode (spoiler alert!) to leave Sterling Cooper, which he connects with Marx’s critique of capitalism as a “general prostitution of the laborer”:

"The great idea of feminism — and what renders it potentially antithetical to the logic of capitalism — is that women cannot be possessed, that they cannot serve as commodities despite the efforts of capital. This is precisely the position that Peggy occupies at the end of the episode as she waits for the elevator. She smiles with the satisfaction of a break from the secure world of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce. She smiles out of her refusal to have a price. As she smiles, the audio track blares out The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me,” a song suggesting a reversal of everything we have just seen throughout the episode. That is to say, capitalism, in large part through the efforts of the advertising agency, promises the man that he can have the woman qua impossible object – here figured as the Jaguar – but at the end of the episode, the woman remains outside the man’s reach. In fact, she really has him and keeps him up at night, the song claims, and she does so because she accepts her position of exclusion and refuses the logic of exchange that provides a path to inclusion.

The burden of this position falls on us as spectators. If we enjoy Peggy’s smile, we enjoy the possibility of our own exclusion and our own escape from the system of universalized prostitution in which we are mired."

[MargaretKrebbs]

The whole Peggy thing eclipses the whole Joan thing in my book (I'm surprised by what Ms. Holloway did, but not flat out outraged - I am seeing a lot of angry feedback for Red). She made a choice, she has a price. She has a family to provide for and now she can. That is unless Lane crushes the whole company.

I see their decisions as two sides of the same coin, neither eclipsing the other. Each woman had a price for her talents. Joan is not a victim. Neither is Peggy. They both made decisions about their futures for themselves, by themselves. They both won. They both kept their dignity.

Lane is super interesting and used in just the right amounts this season.

[MargaretKrebbs]

From New York Magazine "Vulture" section

3/5/12 at 4:30 PM

What Makes Mad Men Great? By Matt Zoller Seitz

We head into Mad Men’s fifth season knowing nothing about it. The on-air promos recycle moments from past seasons, and the teaser art has been cryptic even by this show’s standards: an opening-credits-styled image of a falling man that could be hawking any season, and a photo of hero Don Draper staring at two mannequins — a clothed male and a naked female* — through a dress-shop window. Matthew Weiner, who banned advance screeners after a New York Times review revealed innocuous details from the season-four premiere, has dropped a cone of silence over the production. We have no idea if Don went through with plans to wed his young secretary, Megan; if Joan had Roger’s baby; or if the new agency is still in business. We don’t even know the year in which this season takes place, which at least would prepare us for the wingspan of Roger’s lapels.

On first glance, the black-ops secrecy seems insane. This isn’t a plot-twisty series like Breaking Bad or Homeland; it’s a low-key drama consisting largely of men and women in vintage clothes bantering on the same eight or nine sets. And yet the cloak-and-dagger shtick is of a piece with what’s onscreen. It’s a rare show that can vanish for seventeen months, make a tight-lipped and rather self-satisfied return, and presume we’ll give it a prodigal son’s welcome and be right. Mad Men has earned that level of blind trust because it’s serenely sure of what it’s doing.

Despite the umpteen-zillion forest-for-the-trees “think pieces” grousing that Mad Men doesn’t “get” sixties-era advertising, feminism, racism, chauvinism, alcoholism, culture, fashion, etc., the show’s appeal has little to do with period embellishment. The hits Boardwalk Empire and Downton Abbey, the underappreciated The Borgias, the promising but still unsteady Pan Am and Hell on Wheels, and the dead-on-arrival The Playboy Club — to name but a few lavish period dramas that followed in Mad Men’s wake — were each wedded to a specific era and would have been unthinkable without it. Not so Mad Men. Weiner’s show is set in the American Northeast in the sixties, a time of immense social, sexual, and political upheaval, but it isn’t solely, or even mostly, about its time and place. The show’s main draw is behavior, observed with such exactness that one can imagine the show’s being transposed to the forties or eighties, with different clothes, slang, and inebriants, and still delivering the same basic satisfactions.

It’s not hard to imagine Don Draper circa 1942 selling “Loose Lips Sink Ships” to the War Department, Joan snorting coke off a glass tabletop at Studio 54 in the seventies, or Weiner staging an equivalent of the JFK episode about 9/11. A period transplant would change the historical details, pop-culture references, and mores, but not the characters, tone, or themes. Mad Men would still be Mad Men because the show isn’t about history. It’s about mystery — specifically the mystery of personality. Weiner practices sawdust-and-footlights dramaturgy. Scenes go on longer than TV’s norm and let significant action play out in wide shots that turn the edges of the screen into a proscenium. For all its snappy dialogue, the show’s most piercing moments are silent: Don, AWOL from his daughter’s birthday party, parked at a railroad crossing while a train rumbles past; ex-lovers Peggy and Pete regarding each other through a glass partition; Don and Peggy curled on Don’s office couch like shipwreck survivors on a raft.

This is not Deadwood, with its grubby optimism about society’s and the individual’s potential for change. It’s not The Wire or Treme, with their humanistic empathy for citizens let down by governments and institutions. It’s not the black-comically pessimistic Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm or The Sopranos, on which characters crow about improving themselves, then revert to type with a vengeance. It’s more elusive, archetypal, and intimate. Mad Men’s characters are more true to life than any others on TV because they’re so random, inscrutable, and mysterious, and because there’s no propulsive generic master narrative (the building of a gangster coalition, the completion of a stretch of railroad track, the creation of an innovative drug cartel) on which to string their decisions, revelations, and misfortunes. People do things and have things done to them while history rolls invisibly forward. Some of the show’s plot twists are out-of-nowhere melodramatic, and Weiner has a flair for turning subtext into text (while every major character commits deceptions and struggles with identity issues, Don is literally an impostor). But calling Mad Men a high-toned soap opera isn’t accurate, because when soap characters announce their motivations and analyze their impulses, we’re usually supposed to take whatever they say at face value. On Mad Men, explanatory speeches and dream sequences tend to muddy motivation rather than clarify it.

Why did Don suddenly propose to his young secretary, Megan, following a trip to California with his kids? Don’s previous lover, the professional woman Faye, was roughly his age and intellectual equal and shared some of his pathologies; did that make her a threat? Is Megan appealing because she’s a blank slate who treats Don as a blank slate too? Maybe. Or maybe Don proposed because it seemed like a good idea at the time. Why did Joan impulsively have sex with her ex-boyfriend Roger while her husband was in Vietnam, after she’d established that the relationship was dead and should stay dead? Was it just residual heat from the near-death experience of being mugged, or was a deeper wish being expressed? We don’t know and probably never will. Why is Peggy attracted to scheming man-boys like Pete and Duck, and what’s the essence of her bond with Don? She treats him as, alternately, a father figure, a brother, and an overgrown child. What do they mean to each other? Mad Men won’t tell us. It’s anti-theory. It’s about human behavior observed in the moment. It doesn’t explain. It observes. It’s not about the period, it’s about the question mark.

[Scarlett]

Another good episode (though last week's had more stuff for me). One more episode till the season is over.

Does anyone here have DISH TV - supposedly they are going to drop AMC. I'm guessing that nothing will come of it (one party will concede and a deal will be made) but these things always seem to happen every year.

[vaughnleland]

Horribly Sad episode last night. the loss of one of the shows best characters.

[Pamela Barnes]

I have only seen up to the episode Peggy has left for a new job, I will watch the other one on Wednesday. Has Peggy gone for good?

[PAMANDBOBBYFOREVER]

I just ordered the first 3 seasons on Bluray so this better be good.

[SouthforkHeir]

Hi long time no see ))) Well....I jumped in at the start of this season (5th) and I was hooked, hooked hooked after one episode! They started running the original eps in April and I have been simultaneously watching the new and old. I absolutely love it and describe it as fascinating...I literally can't take my eyes off any scenes....and that is RARE for me LOL. ~Deb~

[Garrison]

HOLY SHIT HOLY SHIT

best season of TV ever? Yes.

I have only seen up to the episode Peggy has left for a new job, I will watch the other one on Wednesday. Has Peggy gone for good?

nobody knows

[Scarlett]

I'm gonna say no to Peggy returning. Elisabeth Moss was missing for a lot of promotional events for the show; and after her character left, it would cheapen the story line to see her return. Peggy should spread her wings and fly, see if she can finally gain some R-E-S-P-E-C-T and recognition.

[SnarkyOracle!]

My S4 DVDs are arriving today. So everybody hush.