According to Wikipedia (to which I had to turn to figure out when we were), Mad Men is, in the wake of a 1966 Kentucky-Duke all-white Final Four bout to play Texas Western and be cast, some decades later, as the villains in Glory Road, about to introduce certain of its characters to the concept of race.
Everything else below the fold. (Yes, I know, I’m a day late — but I’m watching it on iTunes.)
Actually, I don’t have a great deal to say about the episode—Peter Lawler nails it with, “overly mannered, sort of boring, and needlessly sexually creepy.” It was also too long, and at times seemed scripted to fill us in on what happened in the gap between seasons. (“The company’s stable now, Pete.” “Well, stable is just another word for the backwards step between success and failure.”) Pete continues to be the most interesting person on the show; Roger is a man-child with an unhappy marriage; Don has a physically satisfying sex life; Peggy dates radicals and works for the Man. Nothing has changed—except that the new Mrs. Sterling got the best line (Roger: “Why don’t you dance like that for me?” “Why don’t you look like him?) and Roger accidentally integrated the firm.
I’m also beginning to wonder whether these between-seasons jumps, by now a staple of the show’s method, don’t undermine the narrative stability of the show. It’s the beginning of season five, and we’ve already covered eight years. Somewhere along the way, Pete shifted from a petulant brat to a halfway decent and constantly frustrated man whose expectations are always going to outstrip his reality. Peggy has kind of dropped into the background. Don, apparently, has figured out the whole question of how to be Dick Whitman and Don Draper at the same time. But because the seasons end at moments of tension that are then (partially) resolved during the off-season, it always feels the audience has never quite seen these developments. I’m beginning to suspect that the show is less about the characters than shuttling them through the sixties.
Of course, I disliked the first portion of Season Four until about mid-way through, when I began to see the story and character arcs take some shape, so we’ll see. (I also already paid for the full season on iTunes, so I’m watching all of it.) I also don’t know whether anyone really wants my running commentary/open threads around here, but I figured we (I) might like a break from the pending Commonwealth Apocalypse for this month’s show basically tailored at the audience of this blog.
Actually, Erik, I hear Mad Men makes a decent clip from advertisers because of that. I know The West Wing did, and I suspect it would be the same for Game of Thrones if it weren’t on HBO. Let’s get on this! (I expect a finder’s fee for the idea, of course…)
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Speaking of how things sounded: Is it me or were the background noises (telephones, typewriters, etc) particularly and excessively intrusive compared to past seasons?
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It felt to me like a show that concluded the previous season without knowing whether they’d be picked up for another season. You know, most of the loose ends tied up, and less fodder for continuing story-lines than would be the case if they were sure they were coming back for season 5. Only Mad Men was critically acclaimed and wildly popular, making the return of the show a virtual fait accompli. So – weird that it seems like most of the old story-lines are gone (Peggy’s baby, Betty, Lucky Strike, etc). It feels to me that the show is starting from scratch, with quite a few fresh storylines. I feel like more plot continuity would be more rewarding for previous viewers, although maybe the premier was in-part an attempt to attract new viewers.
Also, to J.L.’s point, the show certainly could became a loose narrative of the the ’60s. It would be horrible if this show became an anthology of the 1960s, like that late-90s mini-series, The ’60s.
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1. I’m sure that part of what I’m supposed to be taking away is that Don is being his usual self-destructive self, but for at least this one episode I feel entirely the opposite. His coming in late so that he could make and have breakfast with his kids, for example, seems like the place I always rooted for Don to finally get. His leaving work early when he realized that his behavior had really upset his wife was very un-Don like. Being Mad Men, I am sure that he will be self-destructive again soon, but for right now he seems grounded, if a little unsure that he’s supposed to be.
2. The difference between Don’s two wives is striking. Betty seemed to be the wife that Dick Whitman’s vision of Don Draper would have, and the one that he might have purposefully sought out to “achieve.” Megan, on the other hand, seemed exactly like the kind of thing Dick Whitman was trying not to do – the result of a whim of the heart, and one that is not a pre-calculated career/social vehicle move. That he has told her about Dick, and that she seems not to care, is a sign that maybe this relationship is based on something a bit more substantial that what he and Betty had. I know that many found the ending scenes where Megan seduces Don – and gets him to open up – by doing housework in her underwear creepy, but I think I saw it as an acknowledgment that Don had finally met his match, and perhaps his equal. Last year I think the takeaway I had was that Megan was a flighty nothing that Don succumbed to in a moment of weakness. Now, looking back at the way she is as a surrogate mother, her obvious bi-lingual skills, and her acknowledging to Don and herself that her problem with her Sterling Cooper coworkers isn’t that she fears she isn’t up to their level, but that they might not be up to hers, suggests that the character she most resembles isn’t Roger’s trophy wife Jane, but Peggy. She’s a woman who, had she been born a generation later, would not have been a professional receptionist to begin with.
3. Everyone (rightfully) is talking up Pete and his maneuvering, but my favorite subplot of the episode was that of Lane and the found wallet. It is interesting to see someone that, in many ways, is what the Dick’s character of Don Draper was supposed to be (successful, established, married to the “right sort,” etc.) so unhappy with his life and so unable to do anything about it. The cap to this subplot was pitch perfect: When Lane is buzzed that the “gentleman” has arrived to collect his wallet, Lane’s overly wishful fantasies of a better life come crashing down in the most anti-climactic and mundane of ways. That it isn’t until that moment that he takes the photo out of the wallet suggests that in addition to longing, there might have been some hostility in his decision to pilfer the cheesecake shot. And when he gets to the lobby, you can see in a flash of slight facial movements his surprise and the degree to which it crushes him that he hasn’t “lost” to a young, handsome and witty rival, but rather a slovenly, less than attractive jerk. I thought it was just brilliant, and all the more so for the subtle way it worked itself out.
4. The final scene, where the office becomes integrated due to Roger’s practical joke – and the partners’ meeting outside the front door to figure out how they got there and if there was any turning back? Hilarious.
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My hope is that they pick a good actress to play the newly-highered secretary and that she doesn’t take shit from anyone. And then of course Lane will fall for her because he has already shown an attraction to black women. It really throws an interesting dynamic into the mix, though I fear they might go with the all-too-easy plot lines a la Remember the Titans.
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I also want to take this opportunity to ask if you’ve lost a bet – what with this horrific gravatar of yours?
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Seeing most of the main characters struggling with finding a balance between home and life, and still struggle with happiness is a solid theme to base a season on (assuming they do). I thought Pete going home frustrated, tired and disrespected at work to be “cheered up” by his wife telling him that dissatisfaction is good fuel was a great bit. He has “everything” yet his unhappiness is re-framed as a positive. That is such a recipe for never being happy and always striving for more and more and more.
I expect many uncomfortable moments if they make a black person a character. As much as the male staff is sexist and clueless about women, there discussion about one of “them” went far beyond that.
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I think my memories of The West Wing starting to run out of gas a couple episodes into Season 5 are making me nervous.
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I want to continue to like MM, (and I loved S1 & 2 when it was still an organic show about characters that seemed like real people and not a high-school level American history essay being acted out before our eyes…) but for that I need it to go to a qualitatively new place of some kind, not just advance along the same trajectory it’s been on for two seasons. Right now, after an eighteen-month hiatus, it feels like it’s coming back without anything new to do or say at all. It feels like both yesterday’s news and, at the same time, the perfect embodiment of what it’s really basically about, namely The Subjective Experience of The All-American Office Drone: Same Sh*t, Different Day. I’ve been there. The novelty wears off, just like this show’s did, two years ago.
The Killing isn’t a great show, but right now I look forward to it only because if I’m going to spend time watching scripted dramatic television I need to actually feel something. If I want to do pop-sociology, I’ll come here, where I get to actually participate, or I’ll skip the pop part and pick up a book.
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And obviously, due credit to the show for doing this for women characters from the beginning. To some extent though, I find that often times the subjective female characters actually have been treated as means to the show’s making its points about gender and misogyny, I think this is at the heart of my problem with the show as it has progressed the last two years. the show has som uch to say about gender relations that it renders even its strongest women characters as symbols and not people to an extent. Meanwhile, the male characters have mostly not needed to serve any higher conceptual purpose, but have been able to just be. I’ve always found there to be a tension between the “points” the show has to make about gender and women in this areas, and the ways it uses its female characters as the means with which to make them. This is in addition to the ongoing issue of the tension between the glamorization of the era overall and mens’ place in it (and you can’t deny the show’s presentation of the glamor), and the treatment of women. It’s not unlike the tension in The Social Network, where some have argued that we are supposed to recoil from the way that Zuckerberg and Parker treat the women around them, but in the end, who’s the billionaire. One has to understand that Aaron Sorkin understands Facebook to be a monstrosity of sorts in order to a understand his take on Zuckerberg as a manipulative social misfit rather than as a cunning visionary who’s usually two steps ahead of everyone around him, which to me is what the movie presents if you don’t know Sorkin’s attitude about Facebook and the internet generally. Mad Men has something of a similar problem sometimes in my view, though obviously its baseline view of treatment of women in the era is not in doubt. But it certainly is in tension with the way much of the show is presented; or iow, the reality was in fact surely way worse than what we see from a first-person perspective. The brilliance of the show is that the critique still comes through, but it’s sort of a brilliance of unforced error where all that’s really needed is a de-glamorized portrayal. But would we watch that?
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Thanks for a thought-provoking post, though!
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I still find Pete to be a little too frustrated with everyone else to really care much for him.
Harry has always been one of my favorites on the show, so I was rather uncomfortable throughout the episode.
I think it’s worth pointing out that Alyssa’s essay on the premiere was great.
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