For what it’s worth, the OP says she’s in the middle of rewatching the series. I think she just never took a census of Don’s affair’s hair colors before.
Correct. There is such a fine detail to everything in the show it wouldn’t surprise me if Don has a preference for hair color when it came to marrying versus cheating.
Not to threadshit, but this for me too. Watching this for watercooler talk was the “in” thing to do. At some point I was like, well, I’m too invested to stop now. I was happy when I found out it was ending. I very much did like ogling Joan. Mmmm. There’s just something about that style era and a good looking woman.
How Don never came down with a venereal disease escapes me.
I’m bingeing this show right now (my fourth full viewing, I think) and I hope it’s appropriate to revive this thread–it just seems too apropos not to, since I do have a question and would like a discussion, if anyone’s interested.
It seems to me, as a born Brooklynite of the period, that they missed a card in not giving Peggy a Brooklyn accent. No one from Brooklyn in MAD MEN, in fact, has one. I just watched the scene where Peggy rejects a Brooklyn truck-driver (because she aspires to live the Manhattan life) and it would have been SO much better if they both sported Brooklyn accents, he more than she.
I moved out of Brooklyn at age 18, and it took me years to sand some of the rougher edges off my accent, and a decade of living out of state to lose enough of it to reach the point that most people took me for a generic East Coast guy.
It would have been great (perhaps too subtle and too specific?) to make losing her accent a part of Peggy’s development and eventual acceptance. Eventually, when I’d dropped it completely, I could turn it on in a flash, and surprise people with my pitch-perfect Goodfellas accent–it’s really quite a distinct way of talking (“uh distinct wayuh tawkin’”) that can be overdone badly by someone trying to do one for a role, which might be why they didn’t ask Elizabeth Moss to attempt one, but the least they could have done was to cast a native Brooklynite for the small truck-driver role. He spoke like he was from Ohio, and I think they dropped a card there.
I think Peggy having a stereotypical Brooklyn accent would have been at odds with her character being set up as an ingenue in the beginning. In a narrative sense, having a Brooklyn accent could be an information shortcut that the character has at least some amount of street smarts, and first season Peggy wasn’t exactly wise in the ways of the world as we saw.
edit to add
In fact, Elisabeth Moss changes her voice through the series. That little girl voice she uses in season one isn’t the same voice she has by the end of season 7 when she’s confidently strutting down the hallways of McCann in shades, cigarette dangling from her lips, and a box of Japanese octopus porn under her arm.
One of the pivotal episodes in my mind was Lady Lazarus, where Don puts on Revolver and hears “Tomorrow Never Knows” for the first time. A portent of the changing of the guard if ever there was one.
I’m not sure if I made my point, which is that there’s almost no way that Peggy grew up in Brooklyn in her time and her class without at least a trace of a Brooklyn accent, and almost certainly more than a trace. We all had Brooklyn accents (I grew up one neighborhood away from her.) Kids, teachers, shop-owners, everyone. I was a very literary, very ambitious, very upwardly mobile sort of kid–I couldn’t wait to get out of Brooklyn and move to Manhattan, just like Peggy, and unlike most of my peers who were content to stay in Brooklyn (in their own neighborhoods, mostly)–but I didn’t even realize I spoke with a heavy accent until I moved out of New York City entirely in my mid-twenties and got to listen to the way(s) other people spoke.
Peggy’s accent would have been one of her biggest barriers to fitting into an ad agency in Manhattan, probably much more so than in most lines of work. It would have marked her as being out of touch with most Americans, and she would have had to struggle to overcome its stigma and to speak in a way that felt unnatural to her–again, I had years and lots of exposure to speakers all across the country to do it, and it took a lot of effort, conscious and semi-conscious, on my part to eradicate the way I spoke for my first 18 years on Earth, which I spent exclusively a few blocks from where Peggy grew up. Among my friends and relatives who stayed in Brooklyn, I often lapse a little bit into my old accent, and I can hear it in them, loud and clear.
It’s a major theme in Mad Men, Peggy’s transformation from a shy parochial uneducated girl into a confident, assertive, knowledgable woman, and I think if Elizabeth Moss had been better at accents or the producers had been more comfortable in making Peggy’s accent into a marker, the series would have been improved for it. Certainly the accent of the truck-driver, or any of the men from the neighborhood she dated early on, should have been cast to illustrate the point.
Oh, I didn’t realize you were only interested in nitpicking. Characters have wrong accents in TV and movies all the time.
So Madison Avenue ad agencies circa 1960 had hardly any employees who were from Brooklyn? Somehow I doubt that, but I’m not exactly an expert on linguistical employment trends of the 1960s, so I’ll eat my words if anyone can show it was true.
Well, again, it would have cut against the ingenue characterization, which leads me to believe they never wanted her to have such an accent in the first place.
Usually because they’re big stars who don’t do accents, like Sean Connery famously playing a Russian, a Spaniard, a Berber, an American who has, somehow, a Scottish burr. Sometimes they invent a ludicrous explanation, sometimes they don’t bother. Critics routinely refer to this unfortunate bit of casting negatively.
In this case, an ingenue as you say, it wasn’t an economic necessity, though most people didn’t notice it. Probably most people from Brooklyn didn’t care. I did, though not until a decade after I first enjoyed the show.
I’d known one of my Brooklyn friends for decades before I noticed that he pronounced the word “street” clearly as “shtreet,” and “avenue” as “avenoo.” So he tell you to meet him at the “thirty-sixt shtreet stop on the fawth avenoo line” and if you were from Brooklyn, it would sound like he was speaking the King’s English.
As to this point, I have no idea how many employees of Madison Avenue agencies came from Brooklyn.
I do know that one’s accent (and style of dress, religion, grooming habits, etc.) did present a problem for upwardly mobile job seekers in industries where one faced the public. A Hasidic Jew who applied for a job at an ad agency in the 1960s would be disqualified in under two seconds, and MAD MEN made this point rather explicitly on several occasions, such as when they were thronged with dozens of “Negro” applicants for secretarial positions, or when Draper answered Sterling’s question “Have we ever hired a Jew?” with “Not on my watch” in episode #1.
A white person with no discernable accent, and no particular ethnic background, could possibly pass into a Waspy ad agency, and Jewish applicants could be hired by agencies that weren’t overwhelmed by Wasps (like real-life Sterling Cooper competitor Doyle Dane Bernbach) in the late 1950s/early 1960s, but even in those examples, a working-class background that displayed itself with a heavy Brooklyn accent would be an obstacle to someone seeking a job, and if that job were obtained, an obstacle to quick advancement. I’m sure that someone with talent like Peggy could have overcome such obstacles, but it would have been interesting to see her assimilating into upper (or middle) class culture like an ad agency run by Waspy guys like Cooper, Sterling, and Draper.
IIRC, Peggy is introduced as a send-up of the old “naive small-town girl trying to make it in the big bad city” cliche. In the pilot episode, an older colleague (Joan?) asks Peggy where she’s from, and everything about her characterization so far leads us to think she’ll answer “Frostbite Falls, Minnesota” or some such. When she says “Brooklyn” instead: “[pause for audience laughter]”.
Actually, it’s Pete who asks her where she’s from, and she names the secretarial school she graduated from, and he says, “No, I mean where are you from” and she says “Brooklyn.”
One of my cousins, I noticed, pronounces the “V” in “Brooklyn.” She says it “Bvooklyn.”
I’m watching the end of Season 4 today, and Peggy has a conversation with her boyfriend-to-be Abe, who asks her where she’s from and when he hears “Brooklyn” (where he’s from too) he says, “I can’t hear it.” Her response is to say that it (her Brooklyn accent) comes out when she’s drunk, but as viewers who’ve heard her when she’s drunk, we know that’s wrong.
So the writers did catch their mistake, and tried to deal with it (lamely) in Season 4.
Peggy’s mom, and certain secretaries such as Roger’s (Caroline) and Don’s (Miss Blankenship) did have regional accents of a sort.
Well, I’m apparently learning something today.
What’s the default non-Brooklynite way to say “avenue”?
With a “y” sound in there: av-en-you
We do? I’ve never heard it said with a “y”. I’m from Florida (the non-southern part), and lived in Colorado for a spell.
I’d say the common national way of saying it is “Avva-new” – not quite a “y” in there maybe, but closer to one than the Brooklyn blunt-sounding “Avva-noo.” What do you say, Sly?
I’d say it’s hard to convey precision in phonetics without resorting to phonetic symbols, but there’s definitely a difference between the way I’ve heard Brooklynites pronounce “avenoo” and the way I’ve heard other Americans (and yes, I’ve lived for years in both Colorado and in Florida, among other states where I’ve resided) say “avenue.” It’s the same sound difference between, say, “new” and the first syllable of “numerous.”
If we’re going to discuss fine points of the Brooklyn accent, maybe we should open a separate thread to do that in? This is starting to have little to do with the TV show we’re onstensibly discussing here.
So I guess somewhere out there, on some other message board, someone is posting in a thread saying, “They missed a card in not giving Peggy a Minnesota accent.” I think I’d rather be reading that thread.