Oh my. That would make the show a painful thing to watch.
Back when I said I adored the show, I want to clarify: I adored it as a literary work, as moving, poignant, vivid reconstruction of a time that was troubled, even if often painted as idyllic. I don’t want to go back to those times and when I watched it, there were no characters I wanted to trade places with. But after an episode I often sat either in stunned silence or in tears. The episode near the end where Peggy and Don dance in the office at night was very moving, but only if you knew the back story and what they had gone through separately and together to get to that moment.
My wife refuses to watch the show because she says it’s sexist. I tried to explain the difference between showing sexism and endorsing sexism, but she would never watch long enough to realize that we weren’t meant to admire the behavior of the ad executives in the first few episodes.
Betty and Don were divorced, she ‘lost all the weight’ and was happily married to Henry. Betty and Don were taking Bobby (the son) as a family to a summer camp. I think it was Betty who initiated the one-night stand, for old time’s sake. I can see it happening. She always thought he was great in bed. And even though Don might have been married to Megan, well, why would that stop him? It was a little flashback to when they were a family unit. Don lost no time in having a hot and heavy affair with his neighbor Sylvia. In the same building, no less!
FWIW, Dr. Faye may have been Jewish (which may have given her “non-blonde” points in Don’s eyes) as evidenced by her use of the Yiddish insult “go shit in the ocean” when she broke up with her boyfriend on the pay phone.
Although it should be noted that Joan gets the second worst office with a window facing the creative lounge and two doors between parallel hallways that everyone just walks right through her office. (The worst is Pete’s office with that support column that was always in the way, but it’s Pete so fuck that guy) She is still treated basically like a secretary even though when Sterling, Cooper, Draper, and Price decided to raid the former Sterling Cooper, it was Joan who knew where to find everything and how to get ad hoc offices set up tout suite. She is later treated as a commodity to be traded for a new client and then shamed for it (one of the rare instances of boorish behavior that wasn’t attributable to Don Draper), and not to spoil anything but she ultimately ends up having the greatest character development and arguably the best outcome of any character.
Peggy is more obviously supposed to be an exploration of burgeoning female liberalism (sexually and otherwise) and was explicitly modeled on Helen Gurley Brown, author of Sex and the Single Girl, I found her denouement to be not as ultimately satisfying. It was obviously done for contrast but her development follows a more conventional trajectory. I won’t say more because the o.p. is still in the middle of the show’s run but I was not as thrilled with her conclusion.
Sally is a good character and Kiernan Shipka is a fine if slightly overly mannered actress, but I don’t quite buy into her development through the show. She has an absentee, dishonest father and a sometimes abusive, narcissistic mother, and yet, she seems to somehow end up a well-adjusted young woman with generally good judgment and moderate temperament. She does have some time with a child psychologist and formed a platonic bond with ‘Glenn’ which actually ends up being fairly mature despite what a creep he starts out being (unsurprising given his upbringing) but honestly given the lack of good example and supervision combined with the era she is coming into maturity in, I would expect more behavioral and emotional issues that she would have to work through.
Yes! I remember when she’s showing Peggy around in the first episode: “…accounts, and creative. Don’t ask me the difference.”
Her expertise in 1960 was more like knowing what whiskey brand which executive drank. Eventually it became clear she was smarter than most of those empty suits.
And with a mention of the stupendous Joan, my inner Beavis can’t help but note… Heh, heh you said development
I would love to see a “sequel,” perhaps 20 years in the future in the 80s or 90s, to see where everyone is. I know Betty was dying of lung cancer at the end, so she’s probably gone.
I would say that even at that point she knew a lot more than she let on; she simply lacked the ambition to aim higher, and indeed, she is slyly contemptuous when Peggy aspires to become a copywriter. Again, I don’t want to spoil things for the o.p. but she undergoes a transformation with starts with “that scene”, and her dissatisfaction with being treated alternately like a functionary and a prize to be put on display leads her to reject everything that she initially wanted for herself, and she frankly comes out better than pretty much any of the other female characters in the show.
Sure, but the show goes to great lengths to show the emotional reality of what the kind of lives these characters lead actually does to them. Don is a hollow shell that can’t stop lying even to himself because he is literally living a lie. Betty is a vacuous narcissist who won’t stop sabotaging herself. Peggy is an ingenue with dreams of living in the big city, and when confronted with the pettiness and spite doesn’t succumb to being the same but (mostly) rises above her colleagues by sincere effort and talent. Roger Sterling is basically an overgrown child whose even well-intentioned gestures backfire because he doesn’t understand what it is like not to be an wealthy white guy who had everything handed to him. Pete Campbell is a bitter entitled little brat thanks to his own distant and hypercritical upbringing who has a drive to succeed despite his lack talent and charm. Sal is in total denial of his homosexuality in order to fit in even though it is throttling him. Ken is an apparently empty suit who nonetheless has enviable and effortless talent both with clients and writing. And so forth.
Sally, on the other hand, seems unfazed by what is essentially an abusive, neglectful childhood subjected to some severe ugliness in the adults around her, and yet, comes out seemingly remarkably well adjusted. Maybe she’s just an inherently resilient personality but you’d expect her to be working through a lot of issues in her adolescence regardless. I just don’t buy the character even though Shipka plays her well.
I respectfully disagree. The ending of the show was perfect (and I predicted that they would use that commercial because it was the iconic commercial of the 'Seventies, even if it was slightly anachronistic in the timeline of the show) and I don’t know what would be gained by trying to soldier it on. Mad Men was a rare show that I felt never tried to overstay its welcome and went out on a high note even if Season 4 was a hard watch. It always seemed to be going somewhere with a consistent arc throughout each series and an ultimate goal where each character was going to end up. A sequel or spinoff show would have to justify itself on its own merits rather than just be an extension of this one, and frankly, the way Draper lives, I wouldn’t expect him to make it to 1990 in any case. Most of the other characters don’t really have future arcs either, unless you think Roger Sterling is suddenly going to get motivated to sail singlehanded around the world or you have some desire to see Pete and Trudy Campbell living in the Midwest.
I think the best you could do is put Joan and Peggy back together, but then you’re basically just getting an upmarket Laverne & Shirley. Besides, all the actors have essentially moved onto other work, and I’m morally certain that John Hamm would like people to know that he can do more than play Don Draper and star in shitty Netflix movies.
I’ll never forget that Hare Krishna skankn (‘I burn for you. Burn. does your wife burn for you??’). busting into his office and leaning over his desk, and him unbuckling his pants as fast as he could. I could smell the yeast infection and gonorrhea discharge right over the screen. (and she was so stupid, it didn’t get her anywhere at all :smack:)
Sally will be fine. She has had more issues than just the remote or cold parents. She caught Roger with his pants down at the award ceremony, she caught her father with HIS pants down, she was probably ‘the lady of the house’ after Betty got cancer. She dabbled in drugs. But so many young people had it worse in the 60’s, she had her father’s love and support, there was some money in the family…she had been a steady level-headed character on the show, no reason to think she would decompensate in later years. She never WAS a jolly giggly airhead Brady Bunch type, acting stupid, getting drugged out or knocked up. In the 60’s-70’s, there were disgusting hippies and there were the Nixon girl types, with helmet hair and white gloves, parallel worlds. there are all types in the world.
Yeah, but Harry was intentionally the worst. He was so good at being terrible that you just sort of felt bad for everyone, even Roger Sterling, for having to deal with him. And he was so intent on that partnership that they were never going to offer him. He’s a perfect fit at McCann, where he can grate against being the servile toad that he is.
Well, he works hard at being a sycophantic supplicant, but as Lane Pryce notes, “It’s become apparent that you are excellent at making the clients feel their needs are being met. But Mr. Cosgrove has the rare gift of making them feel as if they haven’t any needs.” Pete is a hard worker but he was hired for his Dyckman name and the access it gave the agency, not for his gifts with people.
As someone who identifies strongly with Sally I disagree–some girls are able to look around them and see how all the stupid fucking shit the adults do leads to nothing but trouble and strife and unhappiness and they become careful and cautious. When you know for a fact that nobody is in your corner, nobody’s looking out for you and nobody’s going to catch you if you fall you become preternaturally and precociously capable and you guard against excess at all costs. You become uber responsible and end up nannying your wilder, dumber girlfriends. You buy them Kwell when they catch crabs, you bring them pregnancy tests and sit with them at Planned Parenthood, you hold their heads while they ralph up their toenails and fend off overly grabby guys at the parties they strand you at because you know someone’s going to have to drive them home when they’ve gotten done banging some rando whose best buddy is trying to do the same to you. You yourself, however, never need these services because–responsible. Ask me how I know this.
My post was clumsily stated but I apologize if it came off as any kind of personal attack. I was trying to say that I understood why Don the character was charismatic and attractive and I should have excluded the extraneous intro to my thoughts. Based on your other posts, your view of the show was similar to my wife’s and I probably brought that into it wrongly. Sorry.
