The bleakest
While nursing a cold—one of those nasty strains whose main symptoms seem to clear up quickly enough but don’t disappear entirely—we finally put on the dvds of Mad Men we’d been saving for this sort of emergency. (Yes, we had never seen Mad Men until last week but we know who Jon Hamm is.)
Over the years we have watched and enjoyed The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Wire, and more recently, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and Homeland, but we can say in all finality that Mad Men is the bleakest of the lot.
Characters don’t drop dead with anywhere near the frequency they do on our favorite shows, but Man Men is more depressing because it is about people who have arrived at The American Dream and discovered that it is empty. They’re not only living a lie, they create the lie, and they’re too invested in it to escape.
So they dull the pain by smoking, drinking and screwing around but they’ll never be saved. The only way out is the window of their 23rd floor office. We gather many Mad Men viewers yearn for those more innocent times when you could smoke three packs a day, have five martinis at lunch and drink openly and constantly in the office without being lectured about your health (Because they weren’t fully aware of the consequences to your health), plus have multiple affairs and commit casual sexual harassment every ten minutes. One thing about that lifestyle: they died young.
Jon Hamm would’ve been perfectly cast as Jay Gatsby. His character Don Draper is already a Gatsby—a man who erased his past, adopted a new name and invented himself. It’s the Great American Novel in TV form.
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June 19th, 2012 at 09:49
Couldn’t agree more. Mad Men is my ‘favoritest’ TV series ever not just because I work in advertising agency but also because of the story’s progression embodied in each episode and how the characters spin around it. Literally, it’s like a mad world with mad people – their burning passion for work and frustrations in all things are insane in a good way. And I love it! Well, I don’t know how to be insane in a good way but it is what it is in Mad Men.
June 19th, 2012 at 10:41
I’m catching up on Season 4. It gets better especially on the 7th episode. One of the most affecting and well-written in all of the seasons, I think.
June 19th, 2012 at 13:31
great series indeed, especially when watched 2 episodes at a time.
best scene of season 4: draper doing a pitch drunk, and acing it. Cure for the common breakfast! (plagiarized nga lang). have to try this once in my life–doing a presentation drunk, maski semi-tipsy lang. planning to do this late this year, when ready to leave present company.
i also like how mad men reminds us that we can make a good presentation using just one illustration board. because now, bosses expect us to prepare elaborate powerpoint slides for even the simplest of proposals.
June 19th, 2012 at 19:10
Ms. Zafra, how about Spartacus?
Have you watched that show and liked it?
June 19th, 2012 at 20:26
Mad Men is one the renewing TV Series that I actually look forward to seeing more of. Another is Touch, have you seen episodes of it Miss Jessica? It depicts a deaf child who communicates through numbers and his troubled father (Kiefer Sutherland). The boy here sees the interconnection of peoples lives, it reminded me of your synchronicity posts. Its an amazing series, made me actually tear up and hug a pillow, although the last episodes of the 1st season seemed to lack the sincerity of the pilot.
June 20th, 2012 at 11:54
My fave lines in Season 4 so far (I’m on episode 10 next), are from Don:
“Give me more ideas to reject.”
“I am glad that this is an environment where you’re free to fail.” BOOM!
June 21st, 2012 at 13:28
I’d been hearing a lot about the “historical accuracy” and the “fine sartorial sense” of the series when I decided to buy the DVDs during my months of bumming around. Yes, I’m a lookist and I like my series with pretty stars in pretty clothes (or shirtless, in the case of men, haha–rambling), but I expected a lot more and Mad Men delivered: it touched on gender and power politics, the treatment of women, the power (unacknolwedged or otherwise) of women and women’s (dis-)enfranchisement by men; marriage (there was spousal/marital rape in one episode), divorce, and adultery; identity, race issues, homosexuality, even adolescence–among other things.
One of my favorite scenes is between Joan and Peggy. Peggy had just fired Joey Baird (kainis, ang ikli ng exposure ni Matt Long) and Joan snapped to Peggy that all it did was to prove that “I’m a meaningless secretary and you’re another humorless bitch.”
No one has died in the series (yet, except Betty’s father) because the people are already dead.