March 27, 2012 - 12:04 am
Some thoughts:
- Pete is is all itch; Don is all scratch. Roger is bored and amusing. Bert is old. Lane is struggling to repress buried thoughts of strange women’s ankles. Peggy is an unknowable chunk. Joan has had a sass infusion. Don’s daughter is growing up to sound like Rose Marie. Life goes on, except now the colors are different and the dresses are made of a single regrettable pattern.
- It did not begin promisingly: Young & Rubicam copywriters who have a Goldwater sign in their office throw water bombs on the heads of civil rights protestors. Did this happen? While Matthew Weiner, the show’s auteur, says it’s based on this incident, you wonder if the miscreants at Y&R really did have a “Goldwater ’68” sign in their office, or if that’s just to underscore some meta-truth about Those People.
- It’s nice to be back in the office, but it sounds like they hooked up all the typewriters to amplifiers.
- Peggy has a disastrous pitch about a bean ballet: “There’s a splash of mouth-watering sauce as each one lands. It puts beans on their mind.” Absurd as it sounds, this is where TV would go. But not yet. The Heinz exec replies: “(Beans) look like bloody organs, and not just to guys like me who served in Korea.” A line no one ever spoke.
- Half an hour in, you think: Pete cares too much. Don cares too little. Together, they solve crimes! That would be the network version, perhaps.
- The Birthday Party scene will be picked over and frame-grabbed for a week; you can bet someone’s already turned Peggy’s little dance into an animated gif. (Update: didn’t take long; said animated gif appears above.) It needs Henry Gibson in a clerical collar to be a complete nod to Laugh-In, but not even Goldie Hawn did anything as cringey as the “Zou Bisou Bisou” number. At this point you expect Fonzie on water-skis to fly through the apartment window, but hello: Don’s embarrassed too. So it’s supposed to be something we can enjoy for its badness, its Laura-Petrie-Gone-Wild vibe, its sign of changing times, and all that. This show works on so many levels! So does an elevator operator, but never mind.
- Roger Sterling smokes like he thinks the cigarette is holding something back from him.
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.