I was baffled by this- doesn’t she say that they have a son in college?
Linda Cardellini is 37 years old, but her character looks to be a few years older–maybe early forties. That’s not a stretch. And from her tone when she mentioned the son, I assumed he was a freshman; his not being home for the holidays was obviously a new development.
And as I think on it, she doesn’t even have to be playing a character older than herself. She could have married at 18.
Oh, and Freaks & Geeks ended in 2000: 13 years ago.
Isn’t Roger Sterling notably older than John Slattery? Google says Slattery is 50, but I think Roger must be in his early 60s.
The only indicators to Roger Sterling’s age is that he is a WWII vet and the father of a young bride. He could be as young as 41 in 1968 (although Slattery’s 50 is a better guess). Since his father founded the agency with Cooper, he is likely a full generation younger than Bert.
I’m guessing he’s in his early 50s.
Roger’s mother was 91 when she died, which would make her born around 1876; I thought this was a bit old for his character’s mother, but this was brought up- that he looked too young to be her son. Assuming she was close to 40 when he was born then that would put him as being born in the WW1 era, which would make him a believable age to serve in WW2, have a grown daughter in 1963, be way too old to happily marry a 20 year old secretary, and be still having a mid-life crisis from hell for most of the 60s. It would imply also that Burt was significantly younger than Roger’s father, or else Roger’s dad married a cougar.
According to IMDB, John Slattery was born August 12, 1962, so he is 50.
I was thrilled that I got another view of the Campbell’s amazing sofa. Do you think it’s some sort of space age plasticky fabric? God, it’s fantastic.
I think it’s made out of the same material as a vinyl tablecloth.
I remember those; most were monochrome but some had fantastically loud patterns. My cousin had a psychadelic one in the '70s that was leftover from when she was a hippie in the '60s.
It’s polyester, I think. Something like that. Not actual plastic. I’ve seen lots of couches from the era that have that shiny look. They retain it even now… the wonders of man made materials!
Based on I don’t know what, the Roger Sterling entry on Wikipedia has him born c. 1917 and the agency being formed in 1923.
Robert Morse is 81 If you assume he’s also playing his real age, then Burt was born around 1888. That’s not a huge difference from someone born around 1876, assuming that Roger’s father was the same age as his mother. Even if he was a few years older or younger, it’s still not a big deal. If Sterling was the accounts man and Bert the creative end, then it would be likely that he’d be younger. Have we ever been told which was which?
I think of Roger being older than John, but using his real age makes sense. The series started in 1960, with him being 43. That would put the start of Joan’s affair with him when he was in his late 30s and Joan was in her late 20s, which works for the characters. And that means Jane hooked up with a man in his mid-40s rather than early 50s.
Pretty much everybody on the series seems to be playing someone within a year or two of their actual age. That’s actually weird for television.
Pete and Peggy’s child is 7 years old now. I wonder if he’ll ever be a plot point.
[QUOTE=Exapno Mapcase]
Pretty much everybody on the series seems to be playing someone within a year or two of their actual age. That’s actually weird for television.
[/QUOTE]
Yeah. There are two cast members on Glee playing teenagers (Mark “Puck” Salling and Corey “Finn” Monteith) who were born the same year as Elisabeth “Peggy” Moss.
I didn’t realize that Robert Morse was that old.
I watched Christine Hendricks episode of Firefly recently and was surprised at how much hotter she is ten years later. (Pic from Firefly)
Joan was born in 1931 per Kinsey’s posting a photocopy of her driver’s licence in season 2. Don met Roger in 1953 when he was buying a fur for Joan; she wouldn’t been 22. That plus her comment about being with the company for 15 suggests she started work at Sterling-Cooper right out of college and sleeping with Roger at the same time. Joan’s also the same age as Betty, but Betty married a lot younger. She graduated college in '53, spent the summer in Italy, then modelled when she got back to NYC where she met Don, and Sally was born in '54 so they were married by then (possibly they had to get married).
I’m assuming you meant that she would have been 22.
We don’t know that Joan went to college. It’s an interesting question. Certainly lots of women who had degrees wound up as secretaries at the time. I always got the impression that she and Betty were deliberate contrasts, though. Betty was upper-middle class, went to a fancy school, and wound up as a bored housewife. Joan was lower-middle class, went to secretarial school if anywhere at all and worked her way up the system. She could easily have joined the firm shortly after high school and been there several years before Roger started the affair in 1953. (I forgot about the fur.)
I thought it was a fascinating episode. I put down “I liked it” but I kinda wish I’d voted “loved,” now that I’m mulling it over. It took a while to simmer with me.
Pete is such a fascinating character. He’s utterly selfish and immature when it comes to his personal life and the people closest to him, yet on a macro scale, he’s always been shown to get things, both socially and politically. From his being forward-thinking in his ad tastes to wanting Admiral to target Jet and Ebony to his obvious disapproval during Roger’s blackface routine to his immediate reaction to Kennedy’s assassination (and oh how I miss how close he and Trudy were during that episode, I loved their bonding over their mutual disgust at the jokes some were making at JFK’s expense!) and now his obviously visceral reaction to MLK Jr.'s death. Doesn’t make him less of a spoiled, petulant asshat in his everyday behavior, but I love the consistency in how he reacts to major events and political issues like this. A remarkable dichotomy but completely in character for him.
Peggy was adorable when Abe casually implied that he wanted children with her, and she realized that it was thiiiis close to a proposal. And yet she so obviously is gonna knock boots with Ted, sigh. Of course Weiner might be pulling the rug out from under us with the foreshadowing (Ted literally being in Abe’s seat, Ted’s wife being rather cold and unsympathetic, the meaningful looks between Ted and Peggy…) but I dunno. With Abe’s tight focus on writing about all the major issues–and I sure hope we’re not supposed to feel sorry for Peggy with his distraction, considering Peggy is just as narrowly focused when she’s in her zone and all she does is write about freakin’ beans-- I really do fear Peggy will finally get to boink her boss after all.
I loooove Don and his kids. It’s sad that Sally is in that obnoxious phase of teendom, not that I blame her for being bitchy to both her parents/step-parents, but I miss the Sally/Don dynamic. I don’t blame Don one bit for not wanting to bring his children down to NYC in that circumstance; God, Betty is too much. (Speaking of which, looks like she’s about to go oan a super-diet in order to be the trophy wife upon Henry’s arm. And from the way she was playing with her hair, I expect she’ll be blonde before too long.)
I have to take a small debate with you, Sampiro, sorry. 
I think you misunderstood what he was saying – which I don’t blame you for, it’s Weiner’s typically opaque writing style (similar to the speech Peggy gave Pete when she told him about the baby, and when Don apologized to Peggy and offered her the job at the new version of SCDP). Don was saying that sometimes kids are born and you have a fear that you’re not really loving them, you’re just doing what you’re supposed to; this is especially true for someone like him, with a fucked-up childhood and no decent parental role model. This is probably a more common fear than most parents will admit to. But he patently does love his kids; it’s been the shining light in his characterization, how despite his self-loathing and disconnection with his life, he really feels for them, and is a good father (all things considered, both the era and his own issues aside); his sympathy for Bobby and Sally throughout the series has been manifest.
However, despite his Don the Deity persona, he really does think he’s shit (and a lot of the time he certainly acts like shit, obviously), and I think he fears he is a sociopath. But once again, thanks to Bobby finally getting a personality of his own (guess that’s why they upgraded to Bobby 4.0), he’s reminded that yes, these children are indeed people he loves, he just forgets about them, because it’s easier and easier to do so now that he’s divorced and even further from their lives.
His connection to his children is one of the big reasons it’s possible to feel sympathy for Don Draper. Like you, Sampiro, when he started in on the speech I started getting really pissed off because Weiner was making it sound as if he was feeling nothing for his kids, and I thought “holy fuck, what is this character assassination bullshit?” But when I finally parsed the Weinerese artsy doublespeak (and most importantly, saw Hamm’s acting, which is always so beautifully done), I understood what this speech was about.
I don’t have the other quote I wanted to discuss, but it was the snark about Ginsburg’s father being right out of central Jewish casting. It’s true, he was, but Ginsburg is precisely the right age to be a first generation American, born of parents (apparently in a concentration camp if that story is to be believed) who fled Russia, Austria or Poland and would have sounded, well, exactly like that. My grandmother spoke exactly like Ginsburg pere, born in 1900 and emigrated from Poland in 1924. And by the time I was born and growing up in the '70s, she still sounded like that, nearly fifty years later. So Mr. Ginsburg, only twentysomething years out of Europe, would still have his accent.
So while he seems like a stereotype, I think he’s absolutely true to life. Mr. Menken was further from the shtetl than Mr. Ginsburg, clearly more assimilated. Mr. Ginsburg is much less so, and that strikes me as very likely for a Holocaust survivor.
(Though I have to say, what was he doing watching TV on Saturday? Tsk tsk tsk. I guess if his son turned it on for him, that would be okay, but that’s the kind of Sabbath cheating I wouldn’t expect out of someone who was truly observant.)
Anyway I’m loving the references to historical events, not just as history lessons, but by showing us history through the eyes and behavior of the characters we know so well by now. It would be absolutely false of them to go through 1968, of all years, and not depict these major real-life events. For a return to the midday drinking and skirt-chasing, go watch The Apartment, Send Me No Flowers or How to Succeed in Business. That era of the sixties is over with on Mad Men.
Though I do hope we continue to get more advertising storylines, as I do love the work stuff as well. (And FWIW, I’m probably alone on this, but dipping back into last week.. I thought the SCDP pitches for Heinz Ketchup were waaaaaay better than Peggy’s.)
And finally: boy, did I hope we’d learn that Doctor Cuckhold and the Most Boring Italian Sexpot Ever had been killed in the riots down in DC. That woman is dull as hell; Don is really desperate if that’s the best he can do after the independent, lively women he’s always hooked up with in the past. My guess is he hoped she was Jewish (he does seem to gravitate toward brunette Jewish gals–and yeah, I’m including Dr. Faye, blonde my ass!). I know we’re in for a trainwreck once that affair is inevitably discovered, but I just wish Don had risked his marriage for someone who had a modicum of a personality.
The rest of your post has some fascinating commentary in it (I think you hit a deeper meaning with Don but I disagree about Peggy), but I really want to expand on this one point.
Weiner skipped over the biggest event of 1968, something that happened earlier in that same week.
On March 31, Lyndon Johnson announced that he would not be seeking re-election. MLK was mostly like a hurricane to whites: some had to worry about their own safety but the consequences were distant and abstract. Johnson’s leaving changed the entire electoral landscape, something that the Republicans at SCDP would feel viscerally. These are still the same people that worked for Nixon in 1960.
MLK’s assassination is important today, but it changed very little at the time. Johnson’s resignation was dynamite that blew up the country immediately. If real life means anything in the show, the rest of the season will be about the election. Nixon’s presidency was one of the main turning points of the century.
When you think I’m wrong about Peggy, you mean re: sleeping with Ted? I dunno, I don’t think Weiner would cast someone as amazingly cute as Kevin Rahm, have these Significant Glances between Peggy/Ted, show Abe and Peggy not quite connecting, and not at least intend for the audience to think “hmmm, affair?” But that could be classic Weiner misdirection. I’d be very very happy to be wrong on this, as I like Abe quite a lot. (He also totally belongs in the cast of Jesus Christ Superstar; I’d cast him as Peter.)
You’re definitely right about Johnson, of course, but if they had to pick one event to highlight this week, I think the MLK assassination made sense, especially since the show hasn’t done much with civil rights yet apart from the Medgar Evers murder and the church bombing and a few other minor mentions, and now they finally have a black character at SCDP. Though Dawn is still pretty minor and not so well-delineated yet, certainly not as much as the much-missed Carla, sigh. Not that black women are interchangeable, I only mention Carla because I really miss her like crazy, especially when I see those poor kids and how they lack any decent strong figure in their everyday lives. Sure wish they could’ve snuck in a mention of her somehow–just Bobby wondering how she is would’ve been poignant.
For another black character, I suppose we can count Peggy’s assistant whose name I forget, but I don’t really see much potential in her character. Would be nice to see a black man in SCDP; in fact, considering this week, it wouldn’t surprise me if SCDP jumps on that opportunity, perhaps with Pete’s pushing.
But to get to your excellent point, Exapno, I can’t imagine they won’t get to Johnson’s decision and Nixon’s campaign; I wonder if we’ll see them fighting for Nixon’s account as they did in '60? Yet the new SCDP might find more that’s tantalizing in Robert Kennedy’s campaign, especially being NYers. Republican or Democrat, the partners have to know that RFK was a juggernaut that could push them to a whole new level, and I think there’s more dramatic juice there if they’re vying for that campaign when RFK is killed. (Hmmm, should I spoiler that for the kiddies? :D)
Hey, it’d be interesting if Peggy/Ted were going after Nixon… Abe would go freakin’ ballistic, considering how he acted when she casually mentioned how much she would’ve loved to have the Goldwater account!
I think Roger and Burt were talking about plans for Nixon’s next campaign in last episode.
Yeah, she was 22. :smack: I couldn’t sworn either Joan or Greg mentioned she studied French in college; she is pretty fluent. Joan may have been a working class girl, but she could’ve gotten a scholarship and/or gone to one of the local colleges like Hunter or NJCW.
I’m also surprised that they didn’t mention LBJ quitting, but he was so unpopular at the time, and the election was so far away, that it had little effect except for politicians. McCarthy was already moving, well before this, and New Hampshire might have had a bigger one. Besides the obvious riots, I remember the assassination having a bigger immediate emotional impact. Today we see MLK and RFK and Chicago almost as a package, but not back then. In high school we wrote about MLK - no one cared that much about LBJ.