Been watching AMC's
Mad Men sporadically for the last couple of years, and it seems like it's finally hit some kind of critical mass -- just popular enough that the backlash is in sight, as I like to think about it.
Anyway. There's exactly one thing that I love about the show -- those perfect moments of postwar advertising. Draper's Zen moment with Lucky Strikes, his touching redefinition of the slide carousel in terms of nostalgia -- these are the reason I watch the show. The rest of the time I keep myself amused by looking at the elaborately-researched painstaking recreations of everyday life in a vanished time. Everything else doesn't grab me that much. I'm not all that interested in the characters and the tawdry struggles of their lives, and those are, by weight, at least nine-tenths of the show. That's why I've only watched it sporadically, despite the fact that it's been on my radar for years, ever since I read an article gushing over the typography.
But I've been watching the best-of reruns, with Weiner's commentary, and that really helps. I like to be given some kind of framework -- it helps to structure my impressions -- and hints like "I wanted to make a show where talking is heroic" really leap out and make the characters intelligible. I'm enjoying the show much more now, thanks to about 90 seconds of chatter per episode. Commentary tracks -- highly recommended.
words from chris, 2010-08-04 04:14:11, los angeles
