It’s the season premiere of Mad Men! I’m in my Brooks Brothers suit with a rye whiskey, an unlit Lucky, a dead man’s Purple Heart in my pocket — took some poking around the vintage stores for that one, let me tell you. After Mad Men caught on everyone wanted one, I guess. My wife is wearing a sharp form-fitting dress, and she’s wearing Peggy-style season-1 bangs, and as soon as the show starts we’ll turn off the lamp — the one where the lamp base is a ceramic cat with a long neck — and settle in for the first show in a year and a half.
That’s how you’re supposed to do it, right? Cosplay for web designers? Dress-up fun for adults who want to act like, well, adult adults. Perhaps. Not for me. Please. It’s like watching Twin Peaks with a bunch of people carrying logs or dressed in FBI black, telling each other they’d like a damn fine piece of pie. (Or “Eip fo eceip inef nmad a,” if you’re short and walking funny.) That sounded like hell, too.
When a show becomes an object of cultish adoration, and the fans assemble to worship together, there’s always that moment when it’s just . . . not as good as you expected. Or hoped. Or remembered. Something’s off; they’re straining to connect with the things they once did with ease. You realize you’re just there for the clichés: a Don Draper Line of Insight (TM), a Roger Sterling moment of nonchalant dissipation. Peggy being the Smartest Bestest Person in the Business, as well as an obtuse and humorless drip. Hey, maybe Sal will come back from the bushes. Maybe Betty will do something so unexpected she turns into an interesting character.
Maybe it’ll even be about advertising again. All right, be back in two hours.
LATER
Nothing happened. Nothing usually does; that’s life. This isn’t a complaint. The soap-opera elements of the show — divorce! infidelity! pregnancy! — aren’t the reasons people watch it. People watch it to see Roger Sterling breeze into the room and announce that the lobby is full of Negroes. Also the clothes.
The review is “too clever by half,” as Pryce might say. We want a good story well told. That story continues. We love our Sally and are pleased to see the same little actress back. We were curious to see how she accepts Megan as a step mom. She plays the adult only when giving her unreliable Dad his schedule. We’re never quite sure about Don, so we watch him closely. I had two problems with the show. There was no reason for the brats to bring their water bombs to the lobby. And the Zooby song didn’t fit Megan’s character, not with all the other French songs she would have known. She comes from French Canada, another planet, a rich source of material the writers would be foolish to ignore. Megan is the new star, because no one is more delightful than a delightful Quebecoise.
What I got from this season’s opener was merely a reintroduction to the show and characters. I didn’t detect any plot points being started, but I didn’t need any, it’s enough just to have the show back on. And Betty’s going to be downplayed a lot this year as January Jones was pregnant for most of the filming. I suspect there might be more about larger, societal issues this season, and a bit less personal soap opera drama.
And no rye whiskey, scotch instead.
The Twist and Goldwater in 1968? Really? Not my memory. But I’m still troubled by the Flintstones’ Christmas Special. Five Alarm Anachronism Alert!
At or near the end of previous season, I wrote this think-piece about Mad Men: http://clarespark.com/2010/10/24/mad-men-and-the-jewish-problem/. The writing has always been dicey, and this year’s opening episode was the worst in memory. The cultish following of this overrated soap opera is puzzling to me. The writing is ever so much better on The Good Wife, also a liberal extravaganza.
I watched a handful of the first season episodes on Netflix a while back. What I saw was well done, but nihilistic at its core, and empty.
Nope, that’s 1966 – that’s why Megan looks like Jean Shrimpton. This is definitely Lyndon Johnson time, pre-troubles.
I was hoping SCDP might get get the Mattel account so I could see all the toys I coveted back then. Oh well, maybe they’ll get McDonalds.
Of course, it didn’t take long for things to start going south that year. When LIFE Magazine put this on the cover, you knew that things weren’t going according to plan: http://books.google.com/books?id=JUwEAAAAMBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Henry Luce had just about entirely exited the building by then.
Never actually seen it. The wife, who does watch it but was too young then to remember any of it, told me she was shocked at the picnic scene when they left their trash on the ground and walked away. Couldn’t have happened, I said. No way. Then, gradually, I remembered sometimes pulling to the side of the road, opening the driver’s door and dumping the ashtray on the ground. Then driving off. Imagine it. Nowadays people don’t even smoke in their cars. Hurts the resale value.