Mad Men is Friggin' Brilliant!

Cafe Society
1

First, let me apologize if there is another thread with this discusses. the SDMB doesn’t allow seraches of three letter wods, hence I can’t search for ‘Mad Men’.

I have just started watching this show on On Demand and I think it is fantastic. I love how it shows that 1960 is kind of like a Bizarro version of 2007. I mean how about:

Smoking anywhere and everywhere, by everybody, even pregnant women.

Drinking on the job, and again pregnant women drinking.

The well defined gender roles both at home, man earns the money, wifey does the cleaning, cokking and child rearing.

The well-defined gender roles at work. The men (white) are the bosses, the women atre the secretaries (they are not administrative assitants). The secretary’s role is the usual along with helping maintain the boss’ privacy, even if it means protecting his affair from his wife.

The softcore racism, sexism, and anti-semitism. By softcore I don’t mean evil and mean, but more off-handed and superior.

Corporal punishment by all [parents with all kids. It’s not prevelant, but there is a scen where a child is slapped for misbehaving,not bny his father but by a different father. No one thinks twice about it.

The pettiness and pity shown toward the divorcee, as if she was a social leper who needed to be shunned and helped at the same time.

What I like I how this is clearly right at the end of this era, before the Vietnam War and the counter-culture trasform everything. So this is creeping in ever so slightly with the beatniks and the divorcee and the women entering business. And I like how the main character seems to act with a continuing unease, as if he can tell something is wrong, something is changing at he can’t quite figure out what it is.

2

I’m not sure how I feel about this show yet, although I’m definitely intrigued. The sets and the costumes are excellent. But the writers need to chill out when it comes to hitting us over the head with all these differences between 1960 and today, and just let it be 1960.

I almost gave up on it because it felt like the plot wasn’t going anywhere, but the episode where Don meets his long-lost brother brought me back. Now I really want to know what he’s hiding from, and how the truth will affect his job and his marriage. It is very interesting to think about how the next ten or fifteen years will change all the characters.

3

Mad Men on AMC: Fantastic.

Obviously I agree with you. It’s settled into less of a send-up type rhythm since that first episode, and nothing ever really seems to happen, but I still enjoy it.

4

Mad Men (and Damages) are the only shows left on my DVR.

It’s not quite at the point where I want to rewatch – one viewing is enough – but it’s definitely don’t miss.

Peggy is still puzzling though. Her reaction last week after Pete told her his hunting fantasy was bizarre. I guess she was sexually aroused, but who eats when they’re aroused? And what’s up with her sudden boobage?

5

I’ve been watching this show every week but at the end of every episode I find myself with a vague empty feeling. The other day it occurred to me that none of the main characters are particularly likeable. Don Draper is an asshole- he has a steady floozy on the side, is trying to bed down one of the firm’s top clients, treats his wife like crap, is rude to her, and has some weird mysterious past that he’s running from. His long-suffering wife has some unspecified mental issues and allows herself to be treated like a child- I understand that behavior may be a product of the era but it doesn’t make her an especially sympathetic character. Draper’s boss is another cheating prick, etc etc. Anyone who drinks, smokes and eats the way the “Mad Men” do certainly wouldn’t look as fit and trim as they do.

I’m not sure where the storylines are going but I’ll give it a few more episodes.

6

This does have to be the slowest moving show on television. Of course, real television drama back in 1960 was also incredibly slow-paced by today’s standards.

As for McNew’s comments, I’m feeling more right about what I posted after watching the first episode. The proper genre for this show is horror. It’s the perfect rebuttal to all those nostalgic images we have of the past. Lives had a glittery surface, but that was only atoms deep. We keep seeing the scratches that mar the surface and let the damaged underbelly emerge. I’m hoping that we won’t see a dramatic life-changing event in everyone’s lives every week, as seems to be true with most modern television drama. Just watching their everyday lives provides enough horror that none needs to be manufactured.

It’s also an antidote to the seemingly endless and bottomless stupidity of people today. Less than 50 years ago, we thought this was normal life and it now repels us in a thousand ways. That gives hope that 50 more years of useful change may be forthcoming.

7

I’m liking it, even though I think they are exaggerating the smoking and drinking that went on back then, and not getting all the history right. The characters are interesting, and the acting is good. They need a good beatnik character, though. At first I thought the divorced lady up the street might be the one, but she’s just a bit more liberal than the other characters. Maynard G. Krebs, where are you when we need you!?

8

Draper’s “arty” mistress has a beatnik friend that she and Draper went with to a poetry slam in the last episode. It was entertaining in a new for this show kinda way. Interesting to see Draper’s lifestyle already on the outs.

9

Draper’s lifestyle stayed on as the norm until… today. The beatniks and later the hippies and later whoever were usually about 0.01% of the population and most adults lived and live just like Draper.

And I don’t think they’re exaggerating the smoking. In my memory everyone smoked everywhere. Hard to say about the drinking, but the advertising business is a subset of sales, and drinking has always lubricates sales. In fact, they never show people getting too drink to work in the afternoon and the office drunk/alcoholic was definitely a component of the business world until recently.

10

Yes, and in all likelyhood bought and paid for by Big Tobacco. :mad: Thus, you think a cig ad is “friggin brilliant”. sigh. :frowning:

They don’t need smoking to portray Cig ad men, as “Thank You for Smoking” proved.

11

I don’t understand what was so horrible about the period. Yes, it had its downsides, but today does too. They got their lung cancer from cigarettes and we get ours from microwave popcorn, so what. Yesterday’s Negro is today’s Mexican. Women used to be secretaries making less than men, and today they’re administrative assistants making less than men. Back then, children were punished with smacks on the butt. Now, they’re punished by absentee parents, especially fathers. I’m not saying we’re not better off today in many ways than we were then. I’m just saying that I, as a racial minority and general social outcast, have fond memories of it, especially with respect to family and community. And I have many fears about many things that I didn’t have back then.

12

I’d think that if the people who write & produce the show are in their late 40’s, early 50’s, they might remember the era as it was presented to them at the time by MAD Magazine when they were its prime age demographic.

In fact, I keep watching, hoping the show’s title is in part an inside tip-off to the magazine’s name, instead of “Mad(ison) Avenue”, and keep looking for some references to the late 50’s, early '60’s satires that MAD did on the advertising world when they were both based near each other in Manhattan.

Instead of adjectives, using nouns with “wise” added at the end: “we’ll see how it goes, dollar-wise.”

Or my favorite: “let’s run it up the flagpole and see who salutes it.”

13

Doubtful.

The smoking on the show is accurate for the time period. Anyone who watches Mad Men and thinks it’s an ad for tobacco is missing the point – which is that in 1960 at least half the population smoked, a lot. Smokers lit up whenever they felt like it, and as any nicotine addict knows, smokers feel like lighting up all the time. It’s realistic, not subliminal advertising.

I read somewhere that Matt Weiner (the show’s creator) said he’s made his point about smoking and will probably tone it down a bit. Which is a good thing, because they’ve made smoking look very unattractive. Nothing ruins a good vice like seeing everyone doing it. :slight_smile:

14

The show’s title is what people on Madison Ave called themselves. It has nothing to do with MAD magazine. And I really hope that nobody breaks the mood of the show by making those bad jokes.

15

Yes, that’s what the “Mad(ison)” in my post acknowledged, but thanks for pointing it out in case anyone besides you missed it.

And the mood of the show is begging to be broken, if it depends on our self-congratulatory assumption that people in that era were so unsophisticated in comparison to us as we buy into Don Draper’s conceit that “we invented love to sell nylons.”

Historically, it was understood by pretty much everyone that advertising was a deliberate insult to intelligence. If the admen thought the joke was on us, then the joke was on them. “Mad Men,” other than showing a sneering beatnik and Pete’s elitist father, so far has chosen to deny this historical point, and IMHO it weakens the reality its created.

So until one of the characters, instead of thinking himself a master sharpie, has a lonely moment of the soul when he contemplates that his contribution to civilization was hiring woman with nice legs to tapdance while wearing a giant pack of cigarettes, and how anyone with a brain must regard him, the show is compromised by fantasy.

16

Absolutely not. Advertising people of the 50s and 60s took themselves perfectly seriously, as would be apparent in a second if you read any of the books on advertising by advertising men published in the period. Head-up-their-ass critics of advertising may say this, but they’re mostly people who don’t have the faintest understanding of advertising, the profession, business, sociology, consumerism, or much of anything else relevant. Nobody who seriously studies advertising has such a silly view.

17

“Mad Men” has been mildly amusing so far, but it’s going to have to improve drastically to keep me watching.

I get it, I get it. Back in 1960, people were so much less sophisticated than we are! Ooh, they smoked! They had tacky attitudes on race and sex! How admirable we are compared to those bozos!

But self-congratulation gets old in a hurry. If this show has nothing more to say than “The Fifties were bad,” it’s a waste of my time.

18

I really like the show.

My take is that it shows the limitations back in those days.

Men seemed to be in control, but not really - women seemed to be helpless, but again, not really. I am starting to see characters who are aching to break out of the mold, but have no reference point.

Peggy dreams of working with the boys, but at the same time, she is trying to fit in with the girls and failing on both fronts.

Some of the guys realize they have to play the game to stay in the game, and it is getting harder to do that and keep up appearances.

It makes me realize what my parents went through - “that is they way things are done” used to be a mantra back then, and if you believe certain segments of society today, that is what they want to go back to and re-live.

People flock to see the Rat Pack show here in Las Vegas, with Frank and Dean and Sammy and Joey doing their schtick and drinking and smoking and telling jokes about “broads”. I saw the show recently and, although the guys playing those roles are quite good, the show was depressing - I realized I would have hated those guys in real life, but it was a different era, different society and certainly a different mind-set.

For me, this show has given me some insight as to how much people were forced to conform back then. There was absolutely no wiggle room - you either played the game, or you lost.

It would be fun to see season two with a person from this era teleported back to that era and shake things up.

Still, for someone my age, it is interesting to see how things were for people like my parents and I guess, in a way, it explains why they seemed so rigid as things changed drastically in the late 60’s and early 70’s. It was all truly beyond their realm.

19

OK. I’m two episodes behind. I’ll probably catch up tonight-- sounds interesting!

I should probably stop reading this thread or I’m going to get more spoilers.

20

This isn’t what I’m getting from the show, but then I don’t feel that we’re superior to any era, really. Every generation believes it’s more enlightened and aware than the one that came before. I think Mad Men is doing a good job of showing this.