In a cosmic coincidence, just days before Netflix announced that it was doubling its rates and renaming itself “Poops Deluxe,” I finally started watching the Mad Men discs I’d had out probably for the duration of wife’s pregnancy and our child’s first six months of life. Guess what? It’s a good show! I have the following spoiler-free thoughts about it in particular after watching the first four episodes:

1. Whoever cast this thing deserves a Congressional Medal of Honor. Jon Hamm is an enormously pleasant man to look at for an hour at a time. He’s like the human equivalent of Craig Thompson’s drawing: No matter how daunting the size of the undertaking, on a visual level it’s just like, “Hey, this’ll be nice.” And supporting players from Christina Hendricks to Bryan Batt are similarly enjoyable to look at for various reasons.

2. There was a twist in one episode involving a firm decision Don made, the kind you really can’t back down from, being undone by forces beyond his control, and I sat there watching it unfold thinking “How is he going to recover from this mess?” Then another character swooped in and fixed it for him by doing something I never in a million years would have thought to do, either as the character or as the writer. That impressed the hell out of me. Writing that’s smarter than you are is a rare gift, frankly.

3. Tom Spurgeon has this thing about contemporary superhero comics being, basically, competence fantasies. The reason all the characters have gradually been powered up into unstoppable badasses is because that’s what the audience is identifying with. They don’t want to see challenges dealt with, they want to see challenges overcome. Nerd culture has a problem with this generally — I see it a lot in A Song of Ice and Fire fandom, where readers “stop liking” Character X when Character X fucks up or does something stupid or reckless or naive, as if doing so makes them less interesting or worth reading about. I watch a show like Mad Men — or The Sopranos, or Deadwood, or The Wire, or Battlestar Galactica, or even Lost, which as the nerd-culture-est of all those shows had to deal with this problem over and over again as they made Jack and Locke progressively less heroic/antiheroic and more unpleasant — and wonder how the fuck those kinds of people process someone like Don Draper. Do they just not watch? Or are these the sociopaths who watch this show and feel like it’s brought back early ’60s smart-haircuts-and-suits-and-cigarettes-and-scotch coolness again, ignoring that all those things are basically just the pointy tails and pitchforks adorning this particular hell on earth?

Tags: Mad Men, reviews, TV, TV reviews

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 21st, 2011 at 1:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.