There’s not much to respond to. I was polite, in my original response, to the person.
There seems to be an unspoken presumption at work that insulting a show is the same as being nasty to a human being and deserves the kind of pile-on I’ve received. I don’t agree. I don’t care even if the person has made mistakes or is “ignorant” as some here have asserted. Respond if you feel like it, reject the person’s opinion if you feel like it, but be polite to the person him/herself.
Whether people do so or not is a matter of board culture. If you think this thread and how people have behaved in it is a credit to the SDMB, I must respectfully disagree with you.
As said, you actually watched it and had an opinion, nothing wrong with that at all.
However, I’d point out that both Don and the “suave and hipster” boss (Roger) both get their comeuppances if you continue watching, for some of the reasons you’ve pointed out. Oh, and Roger does a song in blackface at some point during the show. I think they start to get into the race angle a little bit more as the show as already established. They likely held back early on due to not knowing if it would deep six the show.
Sal didn’t “come out”, Don found out about him and kept it secret. But when it affected the Lucky Strikes account, Don was quick to throw Sal under the bus and for all his earlier discretion still muttered a “You people…”. In today’s world, Sal would have been seen as the victim with the Lucky Strikes guy harassing and extorting him. In Don’s eyes, it was weirdo homosexual perversion costing Sterling Cooper money and Sal got fired.
But another thing to keep in mind is that Sterling Cooper isn’t all of 1960’s America, it’s an advertising agency in New York. So it’s possible for a guy to be gay (like the contract artist Kurt) and have the reaction be “Hey, that European artist is a fruity guy” instead of “Let’s run him up a rope”. If Kurt was expressing his sexuality in a blue collar bar instead of a cosmopolitan office filled with artistic types, the reaction would be very different. You can’t say “well, the guys in Sterling Cooper didn’t act the way guys in an Alabama truck stop diner would have acted so it must be all wrong”.
And if I you think I was being directly disrespectful to you, then I can’t help you either. I even made the comment, “We can disagree like gentlemen,” to soften what I was saying. If that doesn’t count for anything, then you are just willfully trying to see thing in the worst light, which of course everyone in the pile-on has done. Hope it’s been fun for you!
I was born in 1951. My father was just a few years older than Dick Whitman. I found nothing unnatural in Hamm’s speech patterns.
And Rex Reed was not typical of the time at the time. Hef has a midWestern accent, and is not all that natural on TV - not like someone in a normal conversation. So I don’t see what the clip proves.
I’m about four years younger than “Peggy.” I find everything about the show stunningly authentic. Stuff I haven’t thought about for years flies up in every episode and smacks me in the face…some in good ways and some in bad ways. I have a friend from high school who is one year older than me, and we discuss every episode afterwards, both of us reeling from the speech, the sets, the clothes, the attitudes, especially toward women. We were both raised Catholic, so Peggy’s family situation hits home. The series is so realistic that it’s almost painful to watch.
It’s interesting that you claimed you started this thread because you wanted a discussion, but when presented with a differing opinion, instead of discussing the show, you dismissed her opinion with, “Let’s agree to disagree!”