An acquaintance of mine posted this question on Facebook last week: “Does anybody else find Mad Men‘s writing to be vapid, direction glacial, acting somnambulatory, and the cultural references boring?”
I asked my friend Swamp Rabbit if he’d like to respond, knowing he’d had plenty of time to watch TV while in rehab these past few months. “You jokin’ me?” he said. “I got a life, Odd Man. Got no time for TV.”
So I posted an answer of my own: Yes, I suspect most discerning viewers who followed Mad Men noticed that the writing sagged a bit near the end of the series, that the writers’ depiction of the cultural milieu of the 1960s was sometimes laughably superficial.
So what? TV is a diversion. The most you can hope for in a TV series — in this case, a TV serial — is writing that’s good enough to occasionally generate scenes that illuminate the human condition. The same is true of most long novels. Viewers will encounter a lot of filler, no matter how good the writing, but they continue watching a serial for the same reason readers persevere with a long novel. They become emotionally invested. They stick around for the story-telling and, in particular, to witness how their favorite characters behave at critical moments.
I didn’t watch all of Mad Men, but I was a fan. The show had an unusually charismatic lead character — Don Draper, played by Jon Hamm — a quirky supporting cast, and a thoughtful head writer, Matthew Weiner, who focused on the world of commercial advertising to dramatize the socio-economic forces that metastasized into contemporary American culture, such as it is.
Weiner and his co-writers juggled a lot of sub-plots, some compelling and some not so much, and they seemed in early episodes of the final season to not know how to successfully resolve most of them. But give Weiner a lot of credit for how he handled what looked like the total crackup of his enigmatic anti-hero. In the final show’s final scene, Don Draper, after hitting bottom, is shown having an epiphany while chanting “Om” in a meditation group at some New Age-y spiritual retreat. His epiphany involves conceiving what will become a famously insipid TV commercial (circa 1971) that uses touchy-feely cliches to sell Coca-Cola, “the real thing.” Mad Men ends with the showing of the actual TV commercial.
I’d thought Don might kill himself or be killed in some sordid way, or maybe even find redemption in a good cause. Instead, he apparently is reborn as a sleazier version of his former self, selling a nutritionally empty icon of a spiritually bankrupt culture. The real thing.
Not bad for a TV show.
Man I am only on season 3. I love the costumes and sets but the plot is too slow for my liking. Do you think it’s worth catching up and finishing the series?
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I probably saw about half of the episodes. The series is repetitive, but sometimes in an interesting way. Don crashes and burns several times, but comes back even stronger. I’d just skim over the stuff that seems tedious.
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There is a blog, called tomandlorenzo, that does the most magnificent job of analyzing the costumes and story of Mad Men. I’d look for their analyses rather than watch the show.
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Should’ve listened to the Rabbit.
Not necessarily off-topic, though I’ve never seen a single episode I’ve read enough reviews that my son recently loaned me his set of the Song of Ice and Fire, Game of Thrones. Those that pay attention know I’ve long been of the conviction that two, perhaps ten, thousand years ago what would become the Jew, “Christian”, Muslim, Mormon Cult of Male Domination usurped the woman’s rightful place in the proper ordering of the world and everything – everything: War, government, religion, The Church… pornography – serves naught but to enforce that domination. That is the essence of Game of Thrones.
And Mad Men.
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Would it have been too obvious to have called the series “Ad Men?”
“I’d like to teach the world to sing,” was a Pepsi prop clearly meant to end the decade of the 60’s and the show. Which was probably a better choice then ending the show with newspaper headlines declaring that Charles Manson and his “cult” were responsible for killing Sharon Tate and the Labiancas.
That was the real death of “Hippie.” That and the CIA’s misuse of LSD.
The Pepsi corporate ad world simply intended to cash in on the Woodstock Peace generations good name for fun and profit.
Mad Men was a dream sequence taken completely out of context. A show meant only to amuse its writers and a few others “in on the joke.”
It’s always delicious when the so-called smart people get made fun of. And that was the real genius of Mad Men.
How deep did I get in? The first show for 15 minutes and the last show for 10. Everything in between was “filler” for those that “got no life” and plenty of time to watch TV.
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Bernie Sanders 2016
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Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Zionist sack of crap, has thrown his lot in with the likes of Mitch McConnell, John Boner, Bibi Netan-yahoo, and the rest of the Republicans in opposing the Iran nuclear deal. Why does this man hold a leadership position in the Democratic Party?
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knock knock knock ……. is anybody home………………….
is everyone OK?
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