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Mad Men
Apr 22, 2013 11:38:39 GMT -5
Post by TheNewMads on Apr 22, 2013 11:38:39 GMT -5
I've only gotten as far as the end of Season Two, and I quite enjoy the show so far, though because I have the attention span of a gnat it hasn't caused me to go on a bender and watch all the available episodes in a frenzy like Breaking Bad and The Walking Dead have. I'm hearing this rumor that in Season Six it's lost its mojo, but of course some folks say that every season of every show. I was wondering if anyone else is following the show and, without spoiling TOO much, can opine as to whether it's still any good? Because if it's not I'll stop following it, since I've got tons of Archer and Homeland to watch.
kthx!
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Mad Men
Apr 23, 2013 2:45:48 GMT -5
Post by mummifiedstalin on Apr 23, 2013 2:45:48 GMT -5
My wife lusts after Dick Boy. So we watch it. It keeps surprising me for different reasons.
But the main one: narrative and subtext never quite cohere. The writers have mastered the ability to say and suggest different things. That's hard for TV, and they do it well.
Case in point: Don's infidelity. It's a constant, but the reasons for its are numerous. They haven't yet tried to give him a personality marker for why. It's a constant problem. And what keeps the show interesting is that the characters are based around recurring problems rather than identities.
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Mad Men
Apr 23, 2013 16:04:56 GMT -5
Post by TheNewMads on Apr 23, 2013 16:04:56 GMT -5
interesting take. my perspective, and this might be another way of saying what you say about narrative and subtext, is that the show is much more about the effort to recreate past eras with complete fidelity. and, by implication, the complete impossibility of doing same, hence the show's more-real-than-reality look; something funny i've always noticed about movies is when they recreate a decade all the cars are from that decade, when in fact, like half the cars on the road in real life are usually from the decade before, esp. in hard economic times... mad men does that in spades (and in their case deliberately, it's not an oversight): the show is about old times but no one ever owns anything old in the show.
anyway... i also think the show is about recreating all these old paradigms, these things that are quite striking to us but seem transparent to the characters: all the sexism, racism, different marital customs, homophobia, etc. that the characters buy in to (even at their own expense) without reflection but are really jarring to the modern viewer.
so the characters are there not so much as characters but as mechanisms through which the show vectors these cultural commentaries. don draper's not there as a real character so much as he's there to embody 60s-style infidelity (male infidelity) and the different ways marriage was understood 50 years ago. peggy's there to embody the glass ceiling phenomenon. pete and trudy to show the different expectations in the 60s re: child rearing. (as far as i've seen they're still struggling with the kid issue, though i don't know how or if that's progressed since S2.) thus the motivation behind don's infidelity isn't so much an issue, just like it's not that important why pete doesn't seem to want to have kids. the point is simply to hang these social issues on the characters like a coat on a hanger so the writers can have fun exploring all the different ways their society reacts to their foibles...
and then this, in turn, makes the characters more mercurial, which makes the job of decoupling narrative and subtext easier.
ok, guess i'll soldier on into season 3 then.
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Mad Men
Apr 30, 2013 17:00:16 GMT -5
Post by BJ on Apr 30, 2013 17:00:16 GMT -5
so, are you still watching? I loved this show right up until the writers' strike: the dark style, the '60s setting, the ambiguous characters, the heavy drinking... When they came back for season 5, with a slightly different writing staff, the show just seemed off. I guess I'd have to get awful spoilery if I try to explain myself. It just felt like I was watching rejected soap opera plots, complete with amnesia, and I gradually just stopped caring. I found myself rolling my eyes and shaking my head at how ridiculous the show had become. By the last few episodes of season 5, I was just reading plot summaries to see what happened.
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Mad Men
May 16, 2013 22:58:12 GMT -5
Post by mummifiedstalin on May 16, 2013 22:58:12 GMT -5
I was bummed when they moved forward in time so much. It seemed like they wanted to start making it more of a "greatest hits of history" thing. MLK's shooting, etc. I mean, cool. But that always seemed so much NOT what the show was about. It had always been about contrasting that version of American culture with our own post-PC world. But to put it right in the heart of Civil Rights fights and the 60's counterculture just makes it too contemporary for those contrasts to really work well, I think.
But my favorite thing about the show is how most things are so understated (a few recent exceptions notwithstanding).
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Mad Men
Jun 10, 2014 16:32:12 GMT -5
Post by Who Let Servo Drive on Jun 10, 2014 16:32:12 GMT -5
Fast forward a year and even more people are saying the show jumped the shark. I don't. (And actually I think the term "jumped the shark" has jumped the shark.)
The 60s were a time of incredibly radical change. The country goes through that periodically, like in the period from 1917 to 1932 --the country starts that period looking one way, and in many ways the US was completely unrecognizable by the end of the period. It went from a farm-based, inward looking, and very moralistic society into an urban, internationalist and swinging culture in like 15 years!
I think the 60s were a decade like that. You go in the tunnel in 1960 and you're still in Eisenhower's America, "Sixties Extended Indefinitely" as the MST guys might say. You come out in 1970 and it's like you're on a completely different planet. I think they planned to do that all along on the show. The 60s were an awful decade in American society and it's a great decade to walk through for a serious drama.
Personally, I like how you get to see the culture change because that's when I was a kid, so it's interesting to watch the changes that occur when I was little.
I can understand being bummed by them leaving the early 60s though because it's so vastly different from the way we live today.
I've watched the show from the get-go and I was very surprised when people suddenly started saying it was slow, around season 5 or 6, but then it occured to me that season might have been the first that many Netflix binge-watchers had actually watched on AMC. They didn't sense the slowness of the show so much because they were watching, say, 2-3 eps a night. When you watch it once a week, you get a much better feel. I like a slow burn but I know a lot of people really, really don't.
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Mad Men
Jun 29, 2014 6:11:15 GMT -5
Post by Shep on Jun 29, 2014 6:11:15 GMT -5
so, are you still watching? I loved this show right up until the writers' strike: the dark style, the '60s setting, the ambiguous characters, the heavy drinking... When they came back for season 5, with a slightly different writing staff, the show just seemed off. I guess I'd have to get awful spoilery if I try to explain myself. It just felt like I was watching rejected soap opera plots, complete with amnesia, and I gradually just stopped caring. I found myself rolling my eyes and shaking my head at how ridiculous the show had become. By the last few episodes of season 5, I was just reading plot summaries to see what happened. I also thought things started to get a little weak in Season 5. (Seasons 1, 3 and 4 were fantastic television imo). Season 6 wasn't my fave either, though I loved the finale (the Hershey's speech, the closing scene with his kids, etc.) I'm enjoying the 7th season very much, however. (Robert Towne's influence possibly? He's certainly a good writer.)
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