Mad Men

[Tictacbk]

Spoilers...

But then I realized how Mad Men never goes the way you are trained to think as a viewer but rather realizes that and plays on that knowledge. 

This is actually why Lane's suicide bothered me.  I feel like I saw his death coming a mile away, and once Don demanded his resignation (which also seemed a bit out of character if you ask me) suicide seemed clear.  When they introduced his story line weeks ago I had thought Lane would die some other way and all the toying with finances he was doing behind closed doors would start to pop up and screw SCDP.  In this episode once Cooper found the check and Don confronted him, suicide seemed like the obvious choice, but also the least interesting one. 

The fact that his wife bought a Jag that same day with a check seemed all too convenient as well.  Everything struck me as going through the motions to get to Lane hanging himself. 

I feel like I'm the only person in the world who found this episode mediocre.

...I did like everything with Don and Roger though.  Glen still sucks (but the ending was great).

[diggler]

No word on the finale? I thought it featured the best shot of the entire series (Don walking away from Megan) and I loved that cut to credits.  Overall I've found the show way more interesting since it left the old building (and sidelined Betty), but losing Lane felt a little off to me. That seemed like a plotline for a lesser show.

[Brando]

This is actually why Lane's suicide bothered me.  I feel like I saw his death coming a mile away, and once Don demanded his resignation (which also seemed a bit out of character if you ask me) suicide seemed clear.

I saw it coming too but it was because the entire season had a thread of death/suicide throughout the entire season. There were constant talk or references to murder and death and suicide. Don drawing a noose in his notes, or saying he would blow his brains out if he had to live in the suburbs, Pete mentioning the company's insurance covered suicide. Then all the references to murder and death like the sniper or nurse murders or Don killing the woman in his fever dream.

That's why I felt I saw it coming because it was foreshadowed. Foreshadowing an event does seem out of character for Mad Men but this season Mad Men did things that were out of character. If this plot line happened in a previous season, I would have never thought of Lane committing suicide.  I never thought of Salvatore committing suicide when he was fired.

I thought it featured the best shot of the entire series (Don walking away from Megan) and I loved that cut to credits. 

That reminds me this season hasn't used the famous mad men shot this season(not that I can remember) of the slow pull out to end the show which was a mad men staple. I thought that scene was the last shot/scene of the season. To save that shot and to use it at that moment was brilliant. To use that shot of him walking away from Meagan with the pullout then go to the scene in the bar with the girl asking him if he is alone was great.

[Fernando]

No word on the finale? I thought it featured the best shot of the entire series (Don walking away from Megan) and I loved that cut to credits.

yeah that shot is fantastic, and the use of You only live twice was perfect (and I thought that tomorrow never knows couldn't be topped), as I was watching it I realized it a was an epic moment, and yes that cut to black was perfect too.

actually I had to see that ending a few times, couldn't get enough of it, although I began seeing it when Don is watching Megan's reel, which was also an amazing scene.

let's relive that ending:

lol @ those dogs humping.

Overall I've found the show way more interesting since it left the old building (and sidelined Betty), but losing Lane felt a little off to me. That seemed like a plotline for a lesser show.

agree except I hope next season we have more Betty.

[modage]

"Mad Men" is back. I loved it.
http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/review-mad-men-returns-with-a-confident-2-hour-premiere-that-proves-its-still-the-best-show-on-tv-20130407

Becoming convinced if it can *just* keep this up for 2 more seasons it will top "The Sopranos" and "The Wire" as the best Drama of the modern age. It's already entering uncharted territory at this point entering Season 6(!) and being so good. Fingers crossed.

[©brad]

All the death symbolism rivaled the politics in Killing Them Softly in the subtly department. We're in for another dark season.

- I don't think the two-hour format works for this show, especially with this many commercials breaks (dear god were there this many during last season's two-hour premiere?) The pace, which is already refreshingly restrained, turns glacial in two hours.
- This is the first time in the series I've truly hated Don. His existential angst seems completely self-indulgent. I trust Weiner and know he comes from the Sopranos school of people never really change. We'll see.
- "Did it make you think of suicide?" "Of course, that's what's so great about it!" Best line of the night.
- Lots of callbacks to earlier episodes, the carousel being the most potent. We learned those beautiful images of Don and Betty were just a mirage, and such is now the case with Megan.
- Getting out of a segment and into commercials has never been smooth for this show and last night was no exception. Some of the editing from scene to scene was surprisingly sloppy. 
- I loved Peggy's storyline, even if it didn't seem to sync up thematically with the others. You can see Don's influence on the way she does business. Her killing herself over that ad only to succeed brilliantly in the end felt like Don's lucky strike epiphany in the pilot. I also thought Peggy and Stan having their late-night chats was one of the sweetest scenes this show has ever done. Stan has evolved into one of my favorite side characters.

I'm so happy this show is back.

[Brando]

It does look like another dark season. I think that is something to expect for the rest of the series.

Last season was dark and morbid with it's concentration on murder, mass shootings and suicide. This season's darkness seems to be coming from the characters dealing with their own and others mortality. "All I'm going to be doing from now on is losing everything."

It seems the characters have adjusted to the darkness cause last year they were frightened. Sally now jokes about the death of her friend's mother when last year she stayed up all night after reading the paper about nurse murders. Multiple people were afraid to go to parts of the city due to the riots. Now Betty is willing to go there alone. I think the scene where Betty helps the squatters cook perfectly illustrates the characters' acceptance of this new world they're living in. Previously, Betty would never have even acknowledge these people exist but now she's helping them. It's actually funny to see the squatters berate Betty and to dismiss her as you would have expected her to do.

It's nice to see Peggy doing well. You had to expect that she would turn into Don. She only lacks the confidence in her own brilliance.

The carousel was a great callback. The biggest thing I noticed was Don's reaction to the photos. He didn't seem to have any emotional connection to the photos. It's a huge difference from last season when Don was so in love that it was hurting his work.

Don not showing up at his mistress' until end of the show felt like a callback to the pilot. You spent the entire pilot not knowing he had a family while he slept around then the show ends with him going home. That makes more sense when you combine it with Peggy's storyline referencing the pilot and the carousel referencing the last episode of season 1.

Great Roger episode.

Betty spicing things up by offering to hold down a 15 year old girl while her husband rapes her was shocking but Betty has always been a little off.

[tpfkabi]

Anyone have thoughts on the lighter?
Is there anything about it that exposes his past?

I don't believe I ever saw the first couple seasons, so I don't pick up on any early show references.

[modage]

I don't believe I ever saw the first couple seasons, so I don't pick up on any early show references.

If you are serious, that is INSANE.

[Kal]

Speaking of Sopranos, how about Little Carmine making an appearance?

So happy this is back. I haven't watched any TV in months.

[tpfkabi]

I don't believe I ever saw the first couple seasons, so I don't pick up on any early show references.

If you are serious, that is INSANE.

I wasn't interested in any AMC original series until I got into Breaking Bad via a S1 marathon before S2, I believe.

[diggler]

Through all the morbidness, I forget how funny this show can be. Roger rubbing his secretary's back with the two glasses, Harry awkwardly running up the stairs, Peggy's phone conversation with the pastor, the cranky old woman at the memorial service, Betty's cunty mother in law, these bits are really tough to pull off while still maintaining the tone of the show. I don't really mind the 2 hour run time, even though there were too many commercial breaks (there was no need for the episode to go over 7 minutes), this is still a show I don't mind getting lost in.

[Fernando]

Mad Men's Alison Brie is Awesome (Speakeasy) with Paul F. Tompkins

she's adorable. btw......spoils S06E02


im glad she dumped pete (sort of)

also how Don fucked with that fat jaguar asshole's idea...

[©brad]

SPOILERS...



Trudy's smackdown of Pete was spectacular, and the best thing about the episode.

[©brad]

Great recap from NYMAG on last night's episode. I'm sure Weiner will make me eat my words come mid-season but right now Don is the most frustrating he's ever been.

Can Don Draper ever find peace?
Source: NYMAG

That's a legitimate question, I guess, and one that's still very much in play on Mad Men. But when Sylvia implied at the end of last night's episode that she wanted peace for Don, and even prayed for it — Don Draper, a.k.a. Dick Whitman the impostor, a.k.a. the guy shtupping Sylvia when her husband is away, a.k.a. the guy behaving like a petulant brat when his actress wife gets a juicy soap-opera plotline that involves love scenes, a.k.a. the guy who once said that love was invented by guys like him to sell nylons, a.k.a. the miserable bastard who projects his unhappiness outward — you have to ask if he even deserves it, or if by this point we should care if he achieves it.

Yes, I'm growing a bit impatient with my beloved Mad Men — with Don, at least. Granted, this is a slow-burn show in the mode of the last big drama that creator Matthew Weiner worked on, The Sopranos, so I still hold out hope that the writers are arranging pieces that'll all come together in the season's back-half — something to do with abortion or a Don Draper health crisis, I'm betting. (During Megan and Don's dinner with the swingers, Don was warned off cigarettes yet again; they're averaging one anti-tobacco reference per episode now.) And yet ... is it me, or does the show itself seem somewhat bored with Don? I'm not terribly intrigued right now, and not just because season five's stirring and mysterious final sequence — Don leaving Megan on the soundstage while the theme to "You Only Live Twice" played, passing through what almost felt like a time portal and taking a seat at a bar, where a young woman asked, "Are you alone?" — felt like a series ender, a way of saying, "Don Draper will never change. You know where things go from here, audience, so we don't really need to keep going." And then they did.
Luckily Don wasn't at the center of  'To Have and To Hold." As written by Erin Levy and directed by Michael Uppendahl, this was a true ensemble episode that divided its attention almost equally among several major characters.

Joan painted the town with her debauchery-craving Mary Kay–saleslady pal Kate in an evening that climaxed at the hippy-trippy nightclub the Electric Circus, and got shot down during a power struggle at work. The latter felt like the first overt sign that even though Joan is the first woman in the firm's history to be named a full partner, the sordid circumstances behind her promotion ensure that she'll never be treated as the men's equal. What a rotten catch-22: the whip-smart Joan lets herself be whored out for one night for the greater good of the company and her child's financial security, then can't reap the full rewards of her sacrifice because that same company now thinks of her as an opportunist who slept her way to the top. In their drowsy next-morning conversation — bird's-nest hair, smeared mascara — Joan admits to Kate that "I've been working there for fifteen years, and they still treat me like a secretary." Harry Crane treats her as something far worse. Rebelling against Joan's attempts to fire his secretary over a time-card cover-up involving the eager-to-please Dawn, Harry directs his long-simmering professional resentments toward Joan. This subplot's peak finds Harry crashing a partners' meeting and demanding a seat at the table because his own achievements, unlike Joan's, happened by the light of day. (Joan's contributions to the firm go way beyond that, but of course Harry can't or won't see that because he's blinded by professional insecurity and male privilege.)

Dawn's involvement in the fracas was meant to illuminate her character, but it didn't — not really. Thanks to clumsy dialogue that informed rather than illuminated, it mostly gave us a sense of what it's like to work at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce (a place where you hear people crying behind office doors and where one of the senior partners hanged himself in shame) rather than what it's like to be Dawn, seemingly the only African-American employee in a white workplace, and a kindhearted woman who seemingly spends every day tamping down a persistent fear of being ostracized or fired. I liked how Joan's impulsive decision to entrust Dawn with handling time cards and office supplies signaled an official separation from her own secretarial past, but this scene was ultimately about Joan, not Dawn. I can't really give Mad Men any points for trying to turn Dawn into a full-fledged character at this point — not after they introduced her at the start of season five with such flourish that it seemed as if the season would have something to do with civil rights, then pretty much forgot all about her, save for a subplot in the episode "Mystery Date" that was more about the characters' collective fear of random violence and Peggy struggling with passive-aggressive white liberal racism. (I did appreciate Roger's rationale for not letting Joan fire her — not that she would have anyway: Cutting Dawn loose might have poured fuel on prejudice complaints against the industry.)

Megan seems to be making a go of it as an actress, but at the expense of her marriage, or what's left of it. Don is an identity thief who's essentially acting for his very life, so you'd think he could handle the idea of his wife kissing another man in love scenes that Megan described as "tasteful" (meaning "daytime soap circa 1968"). But no. There are cracks in Don's façade of libertine selfishness, and when you peek through them, you can see vestiges of a Ward Cleaver or Gregory Peck type. The producer's dinner-table pitch that Don and Megan come home with his wife, smoke pot, and swing made Don deeply uncomfortable; this tracks with what we know about Don, particularly his evident disgust with beatnik or hippie signifiers of "freedom." (He'll smoke pot with other people for the same reason that other people will have a drink with him — to be social — but I don't get the impression that he thinks marijuana signifies a particular worldview.)

Like a lot of men, Don thinks he should be entitled to do what he likes while the women in his life adhere to certain codes of propriety. He's banging the doctor's wife one floor below them, but he doesn't want Megan to play loves scenes because they make him jealous! There are also women-as-property issues at play here. Don is attracted to intellectually and sexually independent women (Sylvia is only the latest), but there's a part of him that wants to crush or neuter those same qualities and turn the objects of his affection into Stepford Wives like Betty. Megan is rebelling against that impulse. I'm guessing that sooner or later she'll feel the full force of Don's wrath, which is that of a square-jawed, broad-shouldered child who's furious that he can't have cookies whenever he wants.

At least this thoroughly irritating and rather depressing plotline led to one of those multi-valent Mad Men moments that remind us of how great the show can be: After Don and Megan's dressing-room confrontation, Don visits Sylvia, her availability signaled by a penny under the doormat, and lays her down on the bed with the same ritualized motion that that actor used on Megan in their love scene. It's as if Don is imaginatively reasserting his dominion over Megan by becoming that actor — which means that in his mind, Sylvia, who seems to be falling ever-deeper in love with Don, is "playing" the role of Megan; there are at least two, maybe three levels of playacting going on in this scene, which lends additional irony to Sylvia's statement that she wishes peace for Don. She's really wishing peace for Dick Whitman, the "real" Don Draper, a man she hasn't met yet, and who appears to be lowering himself into Dante's hell one ring at a time.

The major workplace story line dealt with the agency's backdoor pitch for Heinz Ketchup, whipped up by Don and Stan in a storage closet and presented in a hotel suite booked by Pete Campbell. It didn't lead anywhere for SCDP.  Ted Chaough's agency — which pitched the same day, acting on inside information gleaned by Peggy during a supposedly "private" phone call with Stan — didn't make any headway either: J. Walter Thompson swept in and got the account, which of course means that Heinz must've called them up and said, "Hey, we've already got two agencies pitching us — you might as well stop in and try your luck, too." It's a moot point now, but I think Peggy's clean, simple "Heinz is the only ketchup" pitch was better than Don's artsy-fartsy absent-presence one, which, like his footprints-in-the-sand pitch in the season premiere, said more about Don Draper's mental state than it did about the product he was theoretically selling. Not to give advice to the master, but at this point I think Don's pitches could use more P.T. Barnum and less Antonioni.

My favorite thing in this episode was Harry's blustering bid for more power. He's an inherently comical character, thanks mainly to Rich Sommer's non-condescending performance; the poor bastard is always on the verge of dignity yet never achieves it. Here, though, I felt he made a lot of valid points, even though he expressed them in alternately self-serving and self-defeating ways. Roger seemed to respect his guts, if not his actual accomplishments. That's why he and Bert Cooper gave him a check for $23,500, the amount of his commission on the Joe Namath variety show that he dreamed up and sold to napalm manufacturers Dow Chemical. ("That was the most impressive thing he's done," Bert said Harry stormed out.) I wouldn't be surprised if Harry left the firm and ended up working alongside Peggy. Ted has already demonstrated a knack for identifying talented people that Don and company have failed to appreciate and giving them the respect they feel they've earned.