Mellotron Sounds » Mad Men http://mellotronsounds.com Floating Notes and Flickering Screens Fri, 29 Apr 2011 01:27:20 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Mad Men Across the Water http://mellotronsounds.com/index.php/2009/08/13/mad-men-across-the-water/ http://mellotronsounds.com/index.php/2009/08/13/mad-men-across-the-water/#comments Thu, 13 Aug 2009 19:45:00 +0000 Mike http://wrestlingleak.com/index.php/2009/08/13/mad-men-across-the-water/
“I guess when you try to forget something, you have to forget everything,” Don Draper told Peggy in a mid-season episode of Mad Men last year. And I guess it must be true, because after last season’s finale, when I spiraled into a withdrawal-laden depression, stocked my closets full of herbal cigarettes, built a bar in my bedroom and started wearing suits around the house to feel closer to the series, the only thing that helped was a campaign of complete and utter distraction. I finally moved on, redefined myself through louder programs, ones that didn’t ask so many questions. And I learned to be content again. But when last week I heard the news that a new season of Mad Men was on the way, I have to admit it caught me completely off guard–as if I’d realized at that moment that what I’d erased in order to take away a little pain was actually an essential part of myself. All those in-school assemblies were right: Permanent solutions are no solution at all for temporary problems…

After 26 episodes, I’m not the only one crazy for this show. It cleaned up at the Emmy awards in both of its two seasons, winning Most Outstanding Drama each time and earning 16 other nominations for Season 2. So don’t take my word for it, but this is the best show on Network TV.

Created by Matt Weiner, a writer/producer for a few of the later seasons of The Sopranos, Mad Men is a meditation on character and the time in which a character lives–in this case, the early 1960s. And it’s all so thoughtful and tragic, everyone, maybe Betty Draper most of all, a beautiful young woman playing house, watching all the light and promise of her youth slowly waste away while she waits at home for her husband to return from work (and, she assumes, affairs), wondering how he’ll treat her when he finally does. And even though they were the center of one my favorite episodes of the entire series last year–episode 8, where Betty finally confronts Don, tearing down every dollhouse illusion of theirs in the process–what I hope to see most of in Season 3 isn’t more of their conflict, but rather an expansion of Pete Campbell’s. As one of the younger execs at Sterling Cooper, a child of both late-’50s and early-’60s sensibility, his was arguably the most consistently interesting dynamic in the show’s first year, but got patchy in year 2 when he’d disappear without explanation for episodes at a time. If that’s the worst I can think to say about Mad Men’s run so far, though, then you know they’re really onto something powerful.

Season 1 and 2 are out now on DVD (Netflix them immediately if you haven’t seen the show).

And Season 3 premiers this Sunday the 16th at 10pm, on AMC.


“This never happend. It will shock you how much this never happened.”
-DD

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