OK, I loved this episode.
One reason is that I am (sadly) old enough to remember when JFK was assassinated.
I was in grade school and word spread quickly - my science teacher said, “JFK was killed!” and we were all waiting to hear the punch line for the joke to follow. It was no joke.
Like in a fog, things started to happen. Without having to make a single phone call, parents showed up at school and everyone left.
It was very eerie…businesses were closing shop as we drove through town and people were standing on the street crying.
We got home and the television was turned on. It remained on for the next four days - non-stop.
Back then, there were only three channels to watch; NBC, CBS and ABC. Period.
All regular broadcasts were canceled and it was JFK assassination, 24/7.
I was alone in the living room watching television when Oswald was shot and ran into the kitchen to tell my parents.
My mother screamed as well.
Regarding this episode, I was impressed they showed a brief clip of Willi Brandt, the then Mayor of Berlin…Berliners were devastated and showed up in droves at the place where Kennedy had spoken his famous “Ich Bin Ein Berliner” speech. Too bad they didn’t show a clip of those throngs of people.
The good news?
If they follow history, upcoming season should show the arrival of The Beatles coming to the US and appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show…and suddenly the haircuts will change.
Wow. I am the only person so far to rate it “hated it”. There’s something I don’t get about this show. This was the first time I have seen it and I struggled to get through 10 minutes then switched off, thinking it is crap. Maybe if I invested more than 10 minutes my view might have changed, but I could not see it getting remotely interesting.
I would think that the end of a season would be a very poor time indeed to start watching Mad Men. A lot of the impact depends on the slow burn that’s been developing for all the characters, over the course of several episodes.
(Another lot of the impact depends on the shock of that period to modern sensibilities – smoking and drinking pregnant women, blithe littering, etc. There wasn’t much of that at all on this episode, though.)
I was with you all the way till the last line. I know that’s what peoples’ membories tell them today, but it didn’t happen suddenly. Certainly not among adults, and not even among college or high school kids except for a few.
You could strip out the dates and mix them up and put them in any order you wanted and people would believe you. More so for the men than the woman, who do change hairdos somewhat.
I don’t know that group picrtures from 4-H really proves this point. Perhaps people in 4-H tended to come from more conservative homes when it came to dress and hairstyles.
Come on. You watched ten minutes of the penultimate episode of the third season of a complex series, and you don’t get it?
Admittedly, the show is not for everyone, but if you want to give it a chance, rent the DVDs of the first two seasons in order and catch up. By the time you’re done with those, the third season may be available for rental, or you can catch them in reruns.
And as for this, I doubt we’ll see much, if any, change in the haircuts of the main characters. They’re conservative businessmen in New York. The only ones who might change are Smitty and Kurt.
It is something about the nature of the show that makes me believe that I would never like it. Sometimes you can tell very quickly. For example, I knew after 2 minutes of Grey’s Anatomy that I would never like it. The style, the type of characters are just not for me.
The Beatles’ advent impressed me mightily–as a high school student in 1964. The Mad Men & Women aren’t in that demographic. Smitty & Kurt were hired to reach The Youth Market, so they may notice that those teenyboppers are spending a lot of money.
The Beatles were first seen as Zany Moptops; it took them years to become Counterculture Heroes. Styles will change, beginning with Mod looks from London–for some. Jane Siegel Sterling has been known to play the fashion victim; just how short will her miniskirts be?
What? Why? She seems like a good teacher, from the little bits of her we’ve seen in her professional capacity. Who she sleeps with shouldn’t matter, as long as it doesn’t negatively affect her job performance. I feel bad for teachers - it’s possibly the most conservative profession. Anything that anyone finds out about their personal lives is treated with the worst kind of “what about the children?!?!” hysteria.
I agree. The way he got rid of Chauncey was rotten, but overall he doesn’t seem like a bad guy. Especially now that he’s back on the wagon (as far as I can tell).
Who she sleeps with shouldn’t matter, as long as it’s not *her students’ married fathers. *
amarone, you’re certainly entitled to like what you like, but I can’t imagine why you felt the need to vote in a poll about a show you’ve seen ten minutes of. I’m pretty sure that the purpose of the poll was to gauge how people who actually *watch *Mad Men felt about *this *particular episode of Mad Men in the context of Mad Men and as compared to *other *episodes of Mad Men, ya know?
The OP did not indicate any desire to limit the poll sample to only people that like the show. It was just coincidence that I watched the show last night (I had recorded it) then the next time I was on the Dope there was a poll about it - it seemed reasonable to respond.
It’s really not that complex, it’s basically an extremely well done soap opera. Having said this last week’s show was one of the absolute worst to try and jump into cold. It’s near the end of the season and multiple plot threads are being tied up, so with no back story the episode would have made zero sense and between the Kennedy assassination, and the dissolution of the marriage, and the ruined wedding there’s was little of the show’s usual workplace drama and brio to buoy things along. Plus it had a lot of Betty and anytime she gets a lot of screen time the energy gets sucked from the room.
You can’t really come in on the second to last episode of season 3 and expect to get it. There’s just too many scenes that won’t make sense. That’s true of any drama series of late, whether it’s Battlestar Galactica or Sopranos, or the Wire. It’s a soap opera, but it’s a really well-made soap opera.
This is true. The characters’ crises and problems have some background and context, and the progress is quite well-paced; they’re not just careening from one catastrophe/conniving plot/hookup to another willy-nilly.
And I agree with the other posters debating with amarone; it’s really hard to get into a series when you’re seeing the end of a marriage without having witnessed the years of deception and hiding the truth finally coming to a head. Not to mention this was one of the darkest (in both form and content) episodes of the entire series! Even the lawnmower incident afforded a couple incredulous laughs; this one was as cold and closed-in as the November evenings it’s set in.
Finally, I think January Jones is doing an excellent job as Betty; she sucks the energy out of a scene because as Betty Draper, the energy is being sucked out of her. Betty’s not an unintelligent woman; her exchange with the family lawyer regarding divorcing Don gave us a glimpse of that. But she’s been stuffed into the role of doting housewife and mother, which clearly does not suit her, and the years of resentment and frustration have done a number on her psyche. Unless I’m completely forgetting any flashbacks, we don’t know what Betty was like as a model or a student at Bryn Mawr; she may have been an entirely different woman then. All we’ve seen of her so far is post-marriage, and for me Jones is conveying Betty’s frustration at the emptiness of her life very convincingly indeed.
I agree on Jones. She plays brittle woman-child in a way that gives you a sense of churning emotions under the surface. No one has expected her to act like an adult, not her father, and not her husband; of course she’s not good at it. ETA: I think she is also insanely good looking.
