SPOILER ALERT
* Mad Men Addresses Civil Rights (capitalized for the critics who wanted it to be addressed in capital letters like that, as if race’s liminal presence on the show wasn’t Matthew Weiner and company doing exactly that already) in the most Mad Men way possible: a bunch of happy asshole ad execs dropping water bombs on a picket line. This sets off a chain of events culminating in Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce integrating because of a prank that people who aren’t Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce actually took seriously. The arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward Joan Harris.
* My first big laugh of the night — and there were many, many more; this show’s hilarious, and after a few weeks of immersion in Game of Thrones I really appreciate that — came when Roger explained schadenfreude to Pete while they discussed Young & Rubicam’s PR black eye: “They stole the Ponds account, and now they’re a laughing stock. Makes me feel better!” It’s telling that Roger derives such satisfaction from something with which he had nothing to do, given that he doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything anymore.
* Pete looks like hell — disheveled collar, ugly tie, puffy face. I feel like his receding hairline became much more noticeable about halfway through the episode — when someone cracked a joke about him going bald at Don’s surprise party, I had no idea what they were talking about, but at some point after that it was like “whoa!” Hausfrau is a good look for Trudy, I think, despite what Pete says to his train friend (surprise: Alison Brie looks good in almost anything!), but suburban fatherhood is wearing very poorly on Pete himself, in physical terms alone.
* Civil rights was not the only c-word to crop up in a newly noticeable way: I’m pretty sure that the ill-fated Heinz baked beans meeting was the first time a client has requested that SCDP make an ad “cool.” Actually it may be the first time anyone’s used that word on the show at all. That’s a sea change in itself.
* Sally Draper wanders around Don’s weird new apartment like it’s the hotel in The Shining, then goes home to a house that looks like the Bates Motel from Psycho. I wonder if Sally will continue to be one of the show’s main vectors for the Weird — from fearing that her baby brother is the reincarnated ghost of her dead grandfather to the masturbation storyline, she’s provided Mad Men with some of its by-TV-standards strangest material. A great way to use a great child actress. (Here’s where I admit to my moment of shock when she opened her mouth and Kathleen Turner’s voice came out.)
* Did Joan select the color of her apartment walls to complement her hair?
* Bert Cooper arguing Vietnam with Peggy’s beatnik boyfriend was a magnificently funny moment. Either one may as well have been speaking Klingon for all the other could understand him.
* The Roger/Jane exchange at Don’s party — “Why don’t you sing like that?”/”Why don’t you look like him?” — will get a lot of attention and deservedly so, but for my money the real killer laugh line was their brief conversation when Roger gets up early to go to Pete’s fake Staten Island rendez-vous with Coca Cola: “What time is it?” “Shut up.” Now there’s a couple that’s comfortable with their contempt.
* Watching Don’s party unfold, with its Austin Powers aesthetic and soundtrack, I realized I’m quite happy the Rat Pack shit’s dunzo. I like to think that contemporary audience members out to ape Mad Men‘s retro-cool style without considering, uh, pretty much anything else about the show, or indeed supplanting the show’s critique of its era with an implicit endorsement, will have a more difficult time of it now that the styles are a) more garish; b) more directly associated with a time of political movement toward the left.
* Lane Pryce and the gun moll! God I hope that was Paz de la Huerta on the other end of the phone. Also, kudos to commenter Collegeboy on Matt Zoller Seitz’s review for noting that the woman’s name was Delores, which perhaps accounted for Lane’s resulting Haze. I’d already thought Jared Harris was James Masoning the living shit out of that conversation, but I hadn’t made the direct Lolita connection.
* Speaking strictly as a longtime guide on Don’s Tour of the Great Brunettes of the ’60s, I take this episode as a thorough vindication of my early Megan support. And not just appearance-wise either, although jeez. Megan may be struggling with Don’s propensity to shut himself off behind a black curtain, and that may be a generational thing, even just by a few years: she lumps her nominal contemporary Peggy in with Don during their conversation about cynicism at the office the following Monday, after all. But in general, it seems like she can hang, don’t you think? She’s made his darkest secret into something they joke about in bed. She’s chosen to stand up to all the potential and actual opprobrium thrown her way by becoming both his wife and his colleague/employee on the agency’s creative end. Most strikingly, in this episode anyway, she’s integrated Don’s many many many hangups into their sex life with real lacerating heat. Her anger during the underwear/cleanup scene was real and everything that led up to it was real, but as her and Don’s language became more and more dom-sub, my jaw dropped: these were not words, and this was not a dynamic, arrived at by chance in this moment. This was sex born out of experience with the stuff that turns them both on, and dark stuff at that. In the past Don could only get that out of his more sordid assignations, including the prostitute he paid to hit him during sex this time last season. Now he’s sharing this with his wife, who also shares his home, his family, his office, his creative life. Neither Betty nor Faye nor any of Don’s affairs ever hit for the cycle like that. Megan’s a force to be reckoned with.
* Which is not to say that their argument wasn’t legit, or its fallout (again!) very funny. “Haveagoodday.” “‘Kay.” Been there, bro!
* Joan Harris, human gif.
Tags: Mad Men, reviews, TV, TV reviews
The problem is that the whole Austin Powers late 60s garishness is something that does go through periodic revivals as well – as ugly as it is, people still love it. So the Rat Pack fetishists will just go to the thrift store to buy all the mod suits and check patterns they sold a few years ago when they realized no one thought that saying “yeaaah baby!” in a fake Cockney accent was funny anymore. The people who like the show for fashion – that is, at least 90% of the audience – will just pick up on the new fashions. People don’t think fashions are ugly, after all, so much as uncool. And they’ll probably be wondering why the show is spending so much time talking about Negroes when it could be talking about how cool Don is. And it will still probably continue to bring in but a small fraction of the viewers that THE WALKING DEAD does, maybe fewer viewers than before considering it’s moving past the mid 60s.
Meanwhile, the best show on TV continues to be SHAMELESS.
“The people who like the show for fashion – that is, at least 90% of the audience”
Tim.
I’m not saying that there aren’t plenty of people who watch the show the “right” way, just that the appeal of the show – something that does not escape the people at AMC – is that it’s a period piece with great clothes wherein old-school Alpha Males swing their dicks at each other and the women do much the same things behind closed doors. Same as the appeal of BREAKING BAD is getting to see people be awesomely savage to one another while being drug kingpins.
Recently I was walking downtown and looked in the window at one of those seedy pseudo-head shop places, the kind that sells velvet paintings of Tupac alongside airbrushed T-shirts of Bella & Edward, and I saw this really awesome (as in, awesomely terrible) wall mural, I think it may even have been a giant scroll, that had all the famous gangsters from TV and movies set around a table to enjoy some kind of “Last Supper/”. You had Brando’s Godfather, Tony Montana, Deniro and Pesci from “Goodfellas,” and then, right next to them, James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano. It really made my day. It confirmed something I’ve long suspected and espoused: satire is dead, the ability for mass entertainment to react subversively to its own conventions is illusory, and even the most lacerating portrayal of male competence – so long as it still meets the bare minimum of expected generic sufficiency – will always rouse the animal interests of the inebriated target audience. A vanishing few get that Tony Soprano was not a role model, they’re just pissed that the show ended on a cliffhanger.
I used to work with a guy who swore up and down that the last episode of the Sopranos ended the way it dead so the creators could hold out for more money for the “inevitable” movie. Probably still believes it to this day.
MAD MEN may be brilliant (it’s still not my favorite show, although it has grown on me), but it’s only as smart as it’s dumbest audience member. And that’s more important than 1,000 articles written by the most intelligent critics of our time.
That that incident made your day is awfully revealing!
I kind of agree with Tim here, except for the part about the show only being as smart as its dumbest audience member, which is, I think, a truly bizarre way to look at any kind of art – but especially popular art.
Having said that, the show’s tango with a lot of un-PC behavior – allowing the audience to experience it vicariously while at the same time maintaining an ironic distance – is so obviously central to the show’s appeal (which is a different thing than “central to what makes the show great”) that trying marginalize that aspect seems like a kind of denial. As in: of course good liberals would never like a show that does THAT, so they argue the show isn’t doing it. That’s a bit of a caricature on my part, but I think a key text here (as well as for any discussion of “The Sopranos”) should be Robert Warshow’s very ambivalent essay on gangster movies.
I don’t think I’d deny any of that — I don’t THINK; it’s early yet and I overslept — but nor is that what Tim’s saying. He’s saying the overwhelming majority of Mad Men viewers are the equivalent of “who’s Tony gonna whack next” people, which I don’t think is true. Bad behavior is certainly fun to watch even in the context of a show/film that ultimately condemns that behavior, but I don’t think the bad behavior on display in Mad Men offers the same visceral thrill as the bad behavior on display in The Sopranos, since no one’s getting killed and there’s no nudity. So just on that basis alone, my suspicion is that it attracts fewer shallow lookie-lous. That’s before you even address the question of how the show presents that behavior and its consequences and whether the overall portrait it paints would seem appealing to most viewers. (Based on past conversations I think you find the era of at least the first few seasons more appealing on surface level than I do.)
I honestly don’t think I would enjoy shows as much without your commentary.
🙂
That’s how it’s done, Tim.
I’ve got tickets to the bean ballet, and the curtain’s about to go up.
I remember now why this is my favorite show.
Great write up, Sean.
Dear Tim, what an absurd thing to say!
Super hilarious, super sexy.
“Everyone’s gonna go home from my party and have sex!”
Super-duper sexy. Sexiest show on TV.
I thought Megan’s Ye-Ye striptease was one of the sexiest things I’d seen in a long time – “Hey look at your talented, powerful, sexy wife” is right where my venn diagram rests, but then the actual sexiest thing on the show happened when she was ass-up, angrily denying him sex she knew he wanted. #WHOOF Mad Men actually surprised me there!
I really enjoyed this episode- laughed out loud at least 5 or 6 times.
I will say that I thought a bit of it was broad, most notably the music cues. I don’t remember what they were like in previous seasons, but I really felt as if the soundtrack was forcibly telling me how to feel about stuff that would have still had great impact (maybe more) otherwise.
Yeah, kind of. But I’ve thought that about a few other episodes too, especially most of the first-of-season episodes, so I’m not worried about it becoming their new style. I think that stuff just stands out because most of the time the show is unusually deadpan.
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