I am rewatching Mad Men and something struck me. I just started Season 4 so this may not bear out.
When Don was married to Betty, he never cheated on her with a blonde…they were all brunettes or redheads. Now that he’s divorced his first serious “date” (meaning they don’t immediately end up in bed) is with a blonde.
I know he marries Meghan, but I can’t remember if he cheats on her (knowing Don, most likely) or he stays away from brunettes during that marriage.
The show is compelling but damn, I can’t really root for anyone. MAYBE Peggy and Joan. I do remember cheering when I saw Joan finally got an office with Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.
Mad Men was a show I watched because I felt I should. I felt obligated, because everyone said it was excellent writing, etc. I couldn’t stand it. The only things I liked were the costumes and sets, the 60s stuff. Sometimes I liked Roger for his wit, Peggy for her feminism, and Pete just for the line “Not great, Bob!” Other than that I didn’t find a single character likeable.
Don does cheat on Megan. With the neighbor down the hall. Can’t remember what color her hair was.
I love this show and everything about it, yet I could rewatch the whole series and it would almost be like watching for the first time. As in, there were some great memorable moments but a lot of the details about who’s who and whatnot have not stayed with me.
Off the top of my head,I can only recall one other blonde that Don was with; the psychologist(?) he was with for awhile. I can’t recall if he was with Meghan at the time, though.
Interesting, now that you mention it, that he did always seem to be with brunettes. A deliberate choice by Matthew Weiner?
I ADORED this show. I am about three years younger than Peggy’s character, and although I never worked in a high-powered agency like SCDP, I did work in a large, male-dominated industry/institution in the early 1970s. The five men in my department treated me as a bright mascot (of course, I WAS a Cute Young Thing back then). I was never as ambitious as Peggy, and while I did throw myself at a married colleague, he was smart enough to gently brush me off.
I’ve tried to watch it again, but the experience of immersing myself in that world was so emotional I couldn’t do it. NO ONE in the show was likable, and after every episode, I swore to myself that I would have to stop… but I never could.
Don Draper’s character is probably THE sexiest, most attractive male character I’ve ever seen-- not in the sense that I felt any desire for him to be real so we could have a relationship-- but just in terms of what my age group, growing up in the 1950s, imprinted on: the good-looking, short-haired, well-dressed, (outwardly) confident Man with a capital “M.” The talent and charisma he displayed-- like when he made his merry-go-round presentation-- was mesmerizing. Don wasn’t an intellectual (which is the *type *I’m attracted to IRL), but he was someone who used his instinct and intuition to survive. The fact that Don had a hidden vulnerability just made him all the more magnetic (moth to the flame kind of magnetism, that is).
I think it had something to do with his mom or his “mom” and/or the prostitute he was with when he was a kid. Man, I am just not remembering something but it was alluded to at some point. He had a thing for brunettes related to the women in his childhood.
I didn’t like anyone on the show except Peggy (Joan’s a good person, but didn’t enjoy the character), but loved the show. I wonder if there’s anything predictive of that dichotomy. My parents also need something to root for. Generational?
I’m trying to withhold judgment on you and women in general (I think your opinion here is a/the common one, fwiw), but I certainly find this interesting, especially as the character is not a good person and is not supposed to be a “good” (and hence many would say should be “unlikable”) guy, also according to Jon Hamm (who iirc in many interviews said he wasn’t anything like Don, a terrible guy). I think maybe his charisma was just off the charts, which I guess for attractiveness makes his terrible traits sort of irrelevant in the same way men can overlook a lot if a woman is “hot.”
He dumped her for Meghan; there was a brief overlap where Meghan was the other woman.
Don Draper is a terrible person in many regards. He also had a terrible childhood, and I think the writers made an attempt to connect the dots between how he treats women and how the women in his childhood treated him. I’m not sure they really succeeded but there’s a lot to chew on there. Regardless, I don’t think you’re supposed to root for him. In the show he’s a force of nature that everyone else just has to reckon with.
I’ve watched the series 3 times and I can’t say I’ve ever really understood Peggy. At one point she says of the high-rolling residents of Manhattan (compared to the working class in Brooklyn), something along the lines of, “They ARE better.” She genuinely believes that the wealthy have something that the poor do not, and aspires for that power, but at the same time she has a front row seat to the unfair advantages that same class has, and bears the brunt of the sexism endemic to that power differential. It always struck me as odd how unsympathetic she was towards other women. She also never expressed any real remorse for dumping her kid on her sister; one of my favorite lines in the show is Don telling Peggy in the hospital, “This never happened. It will shock you how much this never happened.” So she can be a tricky one to root for as well.
Peter Campbell is a rapist, even though both Matthew Weiner and Vincent Kartheiser both letter expressed utter shock that anyone could come to the conclusion that he was a rapist after filming a scene where he clearly raped someone. Not to mention a whoremonger and a cheater. At the same time, his cold and distant childhood paints him as a somewhat sympathetic character. Still, as much as I love examining Pete Campbell’s motivations, he’s the one I’m most irritated about the show forgetting his past sins.
There’s one scene in season 6 or 7, I won’t spoiler this so I’ll be vague, where a character abruptly brings up his WWII experience which has clearly given him PTSD. The show has a way of making you hate people and then suddenly throwing cold water on your hatred. Mad Men has some of the most complex characters ever written, and it’s one of my favorite shows ever. But you never really come away from it liking anyone.
How magnanimous of you to TRY TO “withhold judgment.” :rolleyes:
I made it clear that NO ONE on the show was likable, and his attractiveness to me was based on the attractiveness standard of the era in which I reached puberty. (I knew a guy my age who thought that full-sized white cotton panties on a woman were THE sexiest underwear in the world for reasons you don’t need a shrink to figure out…)
For a further example, the early James Bond/Sean Connery was also cut from this cloth, but no woman then or now in the Real World or in her right mind would want to try to be in a relationship with him.
I binge watched the series because my gf works in advertising. I loved the series. She watched an episode or two but it was too real life for her to enjoy.
Steronz - Peggy did not ‘dump her kid on her sister’. Peggy gave the baby up for adoption, and the baby is gone, not to come back. She has regrets, of course, but there is no way she could have kept it and been a single mother. She didn’t even know she was pregnant until she went into labor, and her career is everything. It worked out well for Peggy and the baby. The sister had her own baby, NOT Peggy’s.I
I adore this show. The greatest episode was ‘The Suitcase’. and in that episode, Don asked Pegg if she ever thought about her adopted-out child. She said words to the effect that she did sometimes, when passing by playgrounds. (I’m surprised her mother didn’t make more of a stink about it, holding her illegitimate birth over her head, she already thought Peggy was a slut and a sinner by wanting to live in the city away from her family)
Don had a big old madonna/whore complex and blondes were the good girls you either married or thought about marrying (including his “first wife” Anna Draper) and the brunettes were the slutty girls you banged around with while married to the nice blonde ladies. Megan was an anomaly, probably because he was basically marrying a nanny and I think he was trying to get hold on his philandering ways by marrying the one he really only wanted to bang around with like perhaps that would solve his mental dilemma. The fact that it didn’t work was surprising to, basically, no one.
I had a rough time with this show because my dad basically WAS Don Draper, IBM executive rather than an ad man but similarly tall, handsome, charismatic and a tail chasing alcoholic who treated his family like shit on a good day. I identified strongly with Sally–even down to mixing the drinks at parties and how everyone thought it was “so cute” even as I was snitching sips enough to get fairly hammered at age ten. Man, those were some benighted times!
Ken Cosgrove seemed like a good guy. If anything, he put up with too much shit and his final moment of telling Roger to piss off was well overdue. Overall, he seemed to have a good attitude, tried to do his job well and didn’t look to screw anyone over.
Granted, he was missing from a good part of the show in the middle seasons so he was more of a B-Tier character.
Thanks for the education, that does change my view of Peggy.