Everybody says the TV series Mad Men is AH-mazing—so smart and cool. Everybody is wrong. I completely fetishize the era’s style—primarily via a 1963 Corvair convertible, a collection of approximately 27 typewriters, and a rotary phone. I worked in advertising for a while, and it’s an industry that would make for a great series IF it were the slightest bit incisive. After a number of episodes, it’s safe to say Mad Men is little more than a tedious, repetitive period-piece soap opera with cereal-box writing and the character development of a mannequin factory. All the red lipstick and skinny lapels in the world cannot save it.
This parodies it pretty much perfectly.
“Ohhh…scotch!…Cigarettes!…Skinny ties!…Rotary phones!…Racism!”
Don’t like it, don’t watch it but it has some of the best writing, acting and direction on television today. Yes, you do have to get past a lot of the “retro” stuff but if you’re that easily distracted, well you always have YouTube.
This show has its flaws but boring? Hardly. These are people with dark secrets and hidden lives and we watch it unfold in a time most of us don’t remember or weren’t even born into. Even the little girl, Sally, has her secrets and boy when 1969 comes and she’s about 15 or 16, she’s going to be a fun girl to watch.
Bethany dear, even Shakespeare’s work could be called a soap opera.
I tried to watch this show, and I got so bored with the in-your-face 60s references. Kids walking around with dry-cleaning bags on their heads to the ambivalence of their parents, pregnant ladies smoking, the secretaries practically doing backflips to state their subservience in every – EVERY – scene. So cartoonish. I GET IT. IT’S THE 60s!
I’m not going to watch a show for set design alone (which is great). I made it to episode 5 or so and quit. Tell me that they tone that down, and I’ll try again.
Also, to the Wire haters out there – watch season 3 (or whichever one takes place at the docks). It’s great (despite the goofball fake-computer stuff).
You’re right, it’s tedious and typically melodramitic. The stories and dialogue….YAWN!
BUT, it does have style and looks. The only thing that keeps me watching. Reminds a LOT of the Todd Haynes film “Far From Heaven” that way.
@47
i cut my cable a while back. I now download the few shows i watch.
@52: I dunno, how do you tone down being the 60s if it *is* the 60s? I can see how people think it’s too “cartoonish” but maybe that’s because a lot of us never knew the decade so things stick out more to us.
If you lived then and you still think it’s outrageously over-the-top, well, I guess that’s your call. There have been other people quoted as saying it’s pretty spot-on though.
And Betty wasn’t “ambivalant” about Sally wearing her dry-cleaning bag. She was decidedly pissed — just for the wrong reason.
Free Lunch, it’s not cartoonish. That’s the way people were back then. When I started working, everyone had a huge ashtray on their desk where the computer is now. We used to play with the mercury in thermometers. Car seats, when used at all, were usually in the front seat, and used only to keep the kid restrained. Mine had a play steering wheel and gear shift that probably would have impaled me if there were an accident.
Ah, those were the days….
Car seats? Are you high? We didn’t have seat belts, let alone car seats. I grew up in the sixties, and when I rode in the car I stood up the whole way, on the floor of the back seat, leaning over the seat back and annoying my sister. I broke the dome light with my head once when Mom hit the brakes a little hard, and loosened my top front teeth on the seat back when I came back down (buck teeth-first, like a subnormal). Crossing over from front to back, or vice versa, or into the way-back (everybody but everybody drove a station wagon back then) while the car was moving was common.
When I learned to drive, my dad taught me how to steer with my knee; your hands would properly be occupied elsewhere, a beer in one and a girl in the other.