Tag Archives: Television

Mad Men: Season 5 (SPOILERS!!)

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“Are You Alone?”

Isn’t that always the case with Don Draper?  Since the former Dick Whitman deserted the War and reinvented himself, has there been anyone more alone?  In Mad Men, Don Draper has managed to excise his past – and Matthew Weiner has somehow managed to make the stunning secret which was this show’s undertow for two or three seasons to frankly not matter anymore.  Don has a wife he loves – maybe – and a good business.  For all of the steps we have walked with him, he should be happy – but when we leave him at the bar when the damsel asks him the above, he seems every bit the island he ever was.

Of course, this dramatic finish was just the last of what was a season full of set pieces, guignol gestures and dream sequences – so many “big” moments for a series which had spent four seasons building a reputation for tiny moments and the slow burn.  Hell, this was a show which spent two entire seasons building up to the central reveal of the series, and yet here we were with a trippy musical montage, one of the partners hanging himself and the partnership structure changing in a seedy (maybe) manner.  Is this the best of the five seasons?  That is hard to say, but it is the “biggest”.

  1. Feminism has been one of the strongest threads throughout the series, and as the 1960s are veering towards increased liberation – the possibilities for women have opened up.  Obviously the glass ceiling was as thick as ever – but as we see Peggy and Joan deal with their lives, there is the chase of something better.  Peggy has continued to be the best creative, and we’ve seen her rise from secretary to Don Draper’s most trusted idea person – so when she wants the recognition and a level of respect commensurate with her performance, it is startling to see Don cut her down to size so cruelly.  So when she announces her departure from the firm – it is a lovely triumphant moment for her, even if her mentor will never fully appreciate it.
  2. Joan of course, has a much harder decision as the chance to close on Jaguar comes on her doorstep.  Life is complicated – with her husband divorcing and without a ton of prospects for being able to provide for her child, she needs more than possibilities.  She is an interesting contrast with Peggy – a woman who has a lot more experience in the “man’s world”, and while being regarded for her looks is not something she is happy with, at some level do what you gotta do.
  3. Betty Francis (not prominently featured this season with January Jones’ own pregnancy) of course remains a woman much more at home in the older paradigm who has sort of bought into sort of a pre-feminist version of things.  It makes for the same tension which has driven her for the entirety of the series – a woman who sees liberation but is trapped both by society’s expectation, but her own co-opting of those expectations into her worldview.  It manifests itself as jealousies and obsessions and trying to ruin Don’s relationship with his children.
  4. Indeed the tension between the old fuddy duddies and the hippie counterculture permeates throughout.  We have people like Peggy who are trying to see a new way forward (a way that her mother clearly is not on board with), but we also have the partners like Don and Roger who have been the big guns in the room for years – and is moving haphazardly into a world where there might not be so much control.  Sure the LSD and grass are cool, but it is fun to see Don not understand the Beatles.  But these are fairly shallow experience, and when we see the issues Don has with a much more liberated wife, as well as how quick he is to hold Peggy’s career back, we see how uncomfortable these white men are with things shifting, even a little.
  5. But at the end of the day, what we see is the fascinating dichotomy between what others see in Don’s life and Don’s own angle on his situation.  We see Pete Campbell, who wants what Don has and sees some sort of ideal life to aspire towards.  There is the house in Westchester, but the yearning to cheat (hello, Rory Gilmore!) and the itch to have a place in the city.  Pete surrounds himself with the spoils of a certain life, but in Vincent Kartheiser’s portrayal, you can see that Don’s life is still the ideal.  Peggy of course has been mentored by Don, and wants to take his mentoring and venture out on her own.  Everybody wants to be like Don – except for Don himself, who is adrift during most of this season.  He is less interested in work, more detached from his wife’s career as she turns down advertising for acting.  He is a man going through the motions – he doesn’t seem vested in his outcomes.  He doesn’t even seem to get energy from his children.

Overall this season was a treat – and the first season I saw in real time.  The show continues to develop the characters – and Matt Weiner has to be complimented for not leaning on Dick Whitman, and forcing Don Draper in a more interesting direction.  Don Draper has seemed  like some sort of male ideal in earlier seasons, but we see a character now that perhaps we are not supposed to actually be rooting for.  But we have seen his lot so clearly.  I keep thinking he has been lying to himself – those times in California seem like the only place where he has been truly at ease.  Has he phoned in the rest of his life?  How sad would that be.

Criminal Minds and a Foray Into Network Drama

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I am sure I’m not the first person to observe that network television is a true cesspool.  Of course, I bet most of the people who offer this analysis would be referring to  reality shows like Survivor, which is actually a fairly deft game show, or perhaps The Bachelor which is much funnier than any two CBS sitcoms put together.  But no, I embrace that stuff – sure some of it sucks, but it is cheap programming and you sometimes get good entertainment if not actually that stimulating.  However, the land of actual fictional television on network TV is – especially in the land of drama – wow.  I obviously knew about the various CSI extrusions, and the sheer volume of police procedurals.  If you built your life based on the world of Law and Order: SVU, you’d basically hide your daughter in the basement until she is 32 and homeschool them without the internet.  But gosh, as I was at an undisclosed location this Christmas and waiting to check out the Kennedy Center Honours program, I had a chance to see Criminal Minds, which is – well, it’s a police procedural.  But this was pretty special – I had to make some notes.

  1. The heft in the cast is considerable for this sort of thing.  That dude from Dharma and Greg, some dude I saw on that Bravo show after Top Chef and Joe Mantegna.  Watching Mantegna in this show makes me realize that David Mamet is not doing nearly enough movie work.
  2. So, the plot of this episode.  Where to begin?  Well, one of the detectives’ cousins or something has become a sex slave to some guy as part of this criminal S&M ring.  I’d like to observe this is a show that airs at 8:00 PM.  On network television.  Of course the show and the network censors lack the guts to actually show the cousin wearing a gimp suit or dog collar or anything – they merely reveal a box that is just the perfect size for a human head with some ominous music.
  3. Anyway – we see a LOT of parts from the Used Screenplay Store.  We get the detective’s aunt (the enslaved cousin’s mother) sobbing about how much she misses here.  We get the explanation that “this is not the woman you knew” (apparently some sort of extreme Stockholm Syndrome sort of thing – this plot point is actually the most plausible).  We get the cops (ok, in this case the Feds) FINDING her captor but the interrogation nowhere.  Of course the villain is black – the average age of the CBS viewer is 54, somehow I’d be surprised if this plot worked in reverse demographically – and he says they love each other.  Needless to say no points for who posts his bond.
  4. The encounter at the precinct between the detective and his enslaved cousin is a festival of wooden acting.  The actress who plays the enslaved seems a bit too wooden – I think the guy was supposed to have beaten her not hypnotized her, but she seemed in some kind of stupor.  It was very distracting, but not as distracting as the case breaking piece of evidence that the cousin’s enslaver’s lawyer was also involved in this S&M sadomasochistic ring.  Frankly at this point the deus ex machina does not move me.
  5. The coup de gras in this episode of course was the manhunt itself where they go to the slave compound – hey, think of a better term,  The detective is involved with a chase of the cousin’s enslaver.  There is the usual fighting, people falling down etc.  Of course when the detective was most imperiled – who is there?  HIS ENSLAVED COUSIN.  That is, his formerly enslaved cousin.  How did she break the programming of years of sexual torture?  How did she change between the meeting at the police station and now?  The show glosses over this completely.
  6. I guess what is offensive and amusing here is the use of something which would have been pretty amazing as a real plot – a sadomasochistic relationship, a woman abused for years and now truly in allegiance and love with her captor, how does one get broken of the pathology, the detective dealing with his family having really slipped – but here approximately none of that is touched.  It is a hacky plot point to churn out 44 depressing minutes of television.

2012 – The Second Presidential Debate

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Politics is something that I tend to loathe to comment on in this space.  I have my political philosophy, and I suppose the intrepid readers do too – and I am sure it can be inferred from other posts in this space on more frivilous topics.  That being said, if I am going to be commenting on television, then it would seem like a bit of a dodge not to comment on the most crackling television program of the last week.  Yeah yeah yeah, I skipped writing after Debate #1, but that was dull as dishwater, the moderator put forth almost no effort, and essentially we were forced to choose between a boor and a corpse in terms of “who won”.  But anyway, some random thoughts to unpack – if you want some more horse racey sort of commentary you can find it in a lot of places, I’ll point to one of my old classmates, for a thoughtful take – as the stuff on TV commentariat largely is pretty useless.

  1. There is something eerily sexualized about the way that commentariat and writers discuss things like Presidential debates.  It’s not just that most of the commentary covering this stuff treats it like a sporting event, where lying and shaky command of the facts is seen as tools in the toolbox, but essentially the Beltway media is just looking for glorious, Russell Crowe like displays of machismo.  When Mitt Romney bullied Jim Lehrer – fresh out of his crypt for this glorious event – look at how weak kneed the Chris Matthews, Mark Halperin population was.  They wanted to feel his muscles basically, and indeed last night’s show the discussion came to Obama’s feats of strength.  I have no idea how a woman could ever win this office in my lifetime when the press and media (and I suppose their readers) are so entranced by locker room behavior.
  2. Indeed, one of Mitt Romney’s early salvos, hushing  the President with “You’ll get your chance in a moment.  I’m still speaking.” had a crystal clear parenthetical “boy” at the end of it.  It stood out in its racist stank in a way that really put us in the George Wallace wayback machine.  Obviously the media did not mention this – since we’ve solved racism in this country for good.
  3. The president let some good hanging curveballs go by still – indeed when the question was posed about the biggest misconception about you, I was secretly hoping he’d say “That I’m a Kenyan Muslim”.  But a lot of it lies in his own brand image, as some sort of political Shane who rode into town and saw these two parties lying there.  His team has always marketed him as something of a blank slate, who is not of a political party and whose personal awesomeness would win the day.  He was better than he was in the first debate, but whenever one watches him or listens to his oratory, it is hard to see why he bothers rolling out of bed to do this job.  There was the moment of genuine anger when his opponent tried to score political points with the Libya story which is still ongoing – but largely he was going through the motions, albeit much more deftly than two weeks ago.
  4. Of course the President also repeated a couple of debunked memes, pandering to deficit fetishists despite Social Security’s good condition and the data largely arguing against structural unemployment (that folks just need new training for these industries that can’t find good people).  Building on #3, it is fascinating that over 3 years his most impassioned speech was to advocate for a Grand Bargain where the safety net gets snipped in exchange for solving the deficit – that’s inspirational for you.
  5. It is fascinating how constipated actual political debate is.  I know a lot of people who put the socialist leftist moniker on the President – which clearly shows a near total ignorance of civics classes in middle school.  But what sort of issues are being discussed?  We had two candidates discussing coal, and drilling for oil, while totally ignoring climate change.  The parties agree on the drug war, and on the unfettered freedom to round up Muslims and put them in shipping crates in Guantanamo, and even on making a fetish of reducing the deficit regardless of how the economy’s actual output is doing (or the actual cost of money in 2012).  Last week, the vice presidential candidates were basically arguing over who gets to crush Iranian people economically more.  Hell, the last day of the DEMOCRATIC National Convention was more or less dedicated to ghoulishly spiking Osama Bin Laden’s head into the end zone.  I can see the argument that the country is more partisan than ever politically – though much of that whitewashes the rest of American history – but the notion that the two parties are really that different veers into George Carlin’s illusion of choice.
  6. When these debates are entertaining, it is clearly in spite of itself.  Yesterday, Gawker posted the Memorandum of Understanding governing these debates (which Romney summarily went back on early on) and what you see basically are folks who are desperate to avoid entertainment or any sort of spontaneity.  You see debate formats like the Jim Lehrer snoozer or the faux town hall meeting last night, and they are stage managed so precisely and the topics so limited (though one man blessedly brought up gun control which floored me) that perhaps just judging the manliness of each candidate is the only thing that you can use to grade the debate.  The Debate Commission’s job seems to be  to stamp out the edges of the area to debate basically.
  7. Salon’s Alex Pareene has some good ideas on what would make things better.  Of course this will never happen, since once again both parties are trying to discourage close listening of what is being said.

Mad Men: Season 4 (SPOILERS!!) and a Li’l Husslin’

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Before we dive into a season of Mad Men, where everybody ends up – well, frankly kind of happy basically – some cause pimpin from the real world.  A Canadian former classmate of mine is doing her annual thingy to fight Cystic Fibrosis.  Obviously this is a good cause – and if you are watching the resplendent NHL playoffs or have eaten poutine (and let’s face it playoff hockey AND poutine together would be a combination that makes American football look like paint drying), you realize how worthy any Canadian folks are of your support.  Hell, even if you just think Dave Foley makes a good looking chick.  Anyway, click and toss some virtual shekels here.  And if the sprit of giving has not dissipated after your encounter with CF, I find Global Giving a good outlet myself.

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So, four seasons into AMC’s remarkable Mad Men, the patience that was required to navigate the early episodes where it looked like nothing much was going on, has long since passed.  As Jon Hamm himself pointed out in his recent appearance on the Nerdist, weirdly everybody is in a relatively good place by the time the season is over.  Now, don’t get me wrong, by happy it does not mean that things aren’t wobbly – “happily ever after” would be too neat a cliche for a show with the richness of good fiction to fall into.  Sterling, Cooper, Draper and Price is not precisely doing well, but it seems like they are not going to go belly up.  Don has found if not happiness, something akin to a decent cut at it, and the others are similarly – tentatively positioned in places where they are looking for firm ground (even Lane, despite some horrible steps in the middle).  Even Betty, the wobbliest of the them all, has a husband she is happy enough with.  Sure her daughter is a pain in the ass – but such are daughters for mothers throughout history.

Some observations from Season 4 (Season One, Season Two, Season Three are all here … no spoiler alert needed now I guess):

  1. One of the interesting sly shifts of the four seasons has been how the mystery of Don Draper has evolved.  In Season One, I would have probably been flogged (rightly so) for revealing Don’s secret.  It was pretty shocking – but at this point, the Dick Whitman story has sort of faded into the background.  Sure, it haunts him – but so does his unhappy childhood – but is more fitting in the suite of “trauma from the past” than anything.  Indeed when he reveals the secret now to Dr. Miller, she is surprisingly understanding – and shockingly, well, unshocked.  The real focus of Don’s season is just on life after marriage – and how his life, which in some ways did not differ from what he had been doing while married – started to go off the rails.
  2. Of course when his life did bottom out, his reaction was – well, it seems to indicate a guy who still doesn’t really know what it going to bring him real fulfillment.  While we get a sense of his comfort in California, it is not like he checks in there regularly.  We’ve seen him with Beats, a really young girlfriend, a regular lady, a schoolmarm.  His fling with Dr. Miller the market researcher actually showed great promise.  She certainly was more of a “grown-up” (and by no means a step down for Don given the catches he has had).  But her awkwardness with kids seemed to paralyze him.  His decisions at the end of the season in this area were obviously rash – but if you look at part of Don coming up from rock bottom as him regaining control of all of this affairs – that being a “proper father” be high on the list is sensible.  Yeah his read of who is good for his children or whatever was gauche, but it made sense for the character.  As Dr. Miller noted, he does love “the beginning of things”.
  3. We know that it’s 1965 roughly, and the ground is shifting.  The “I Have a Dream” speech has happened, and the notion that women can be more than a womb with legs has started to take hold in force.  What is interesting is where the characters are in terms of just understanding change.  Joan is going to have a baby, but that does not imply domesticity by any indication while Peggy continues to work up the ladder.  Indeed, one of the fun parts of the season is seeing Peggy explore the world of trying to be a professional in the city – including encounters with counterculture, and being help up at work.  She and Joan’s exchange after a pretty darn harassing cartoon of Joan encapsulate the tension of being a woman in a workplace that is still relevant right now.
  4. The funny thing about the changing world is where the characters are with dealing with change.  We know Pete gets it – but his idea of seeing black people as customers does not click at all.  On the other hand, Sterling and Cooper themselves – it’s still dames and “his girl” and traditional old world chauvenism.  In particular, it is hard to see what Roger brings to the table anymore, especially losing the big account.  He is happy I suppose, but definitely searching for the next chapter (and not just his memoir).

Mad Men: Season 3 (SPOILERS!!)

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When we last left the gang at Sterling-Cooper, the firm was being acquired by a parent company in England.  Meanwhile, Don Draper’s own affairs continued to get muddier as he and his wife started drifting apart but returned together as she got pregnant.  Peggy Olson, the other REAL protagonist, continues to rise up the ranks and push imperfectly to find herself.  She had to give up a child, and finally Pete Campbell – who was the inseminator – got to hear it from her.

This third season of Mad Men could be called the series’ strongest season yet – but that is hard to say.  Moreover, this is definitely the season where a lot of the threads started to pay off.  Some of the social forces and interactions that were threatening to invade their worlds do so – and the impact on the corresponding interactions and whatnot is at its most fascinating.  Some specific observations (click on links for Season 1 and Season 2 reviews):

  1. Really the stories seem to revolve around agency.  Betty is still pretty darn weird – but the lack of agency she feels makes sense.  After all, she was raised to be a housewife or whatever constitutes virtue for a gal raised in the 40s/50s.  She is a daughter, then Don’s wife.  She owns NOTHING, and she is clearly unhappy.  However, with so few outlets to get anything done, both socially and actually – consider the advice she gets about divorce (she is pretty screwed without consent).  Her acting out makes sense.
  2. On the other hand, the catalyst for her making a move with Don was one of the stranger sequences of the year.  Indeed the entire world (within this framework) reaction to the Kennedy Assassination was one of the most significant storylines of the season.  That Betty would be shaken by it makes total sense, but Betty’s emotional reaction and the transition to her own life, all of that rang false.  Part of it is the necessary simplifying about how large events drive personal ones – but most of it is January Jones’ poor acting.
  3. Of course at the center of this is what has to be the central scene of the entire series to date – where Don confesses his reality – the whole thing – to Betty.  Her reactions here seem false, but I think a lot of that is poor acting choices more than anything.  She does not seem appropriately blown away by what Don says – and yeah while he does lie a lot, it is hard to make up a whopper like this.  The lack of tenderness she showed as he actually did pour his soul out seems to belie their relationship.  She seems very cold to me here.  Of course my wife has not revealed that she has stolen a breast cancer victim’s identity back in Northern Ohio – so what do I know?
  4. The question of agency also lingers with Joan, the well endowed Christina Hendricks.  For her, it is at home trying to stand by a man who is doing his residency and trying to become a full time surgeon.  At work – she has all sorts of power as head of the secretarial pool and office manager.  There is agency there, but at home she has to try to stand by her man, and fit into a paradigm – including leaving Sterling Cooper.  Her farewell of course leads to the most surprising and funny surprise of the whole season.  The horrible special effects were a great touch.
  5. Peggy is fighting uphill still – she DOES have ownership of her life.  It has been hard though.  In the way that she still has to keep having people take her seriously – and she is pretty clearly the best creative there of Don’s minions.  Alas, her personal life seems to have a lot of bad decisions – although the show forgets to circle back on her affair with Duck.  The dynamic between Don and Peggy is very interesting – Don clearly is very fond of her work, but is also capable of cruelty – especially when she tries to stand up for herself.
  6. It really is Don’s ugliest side – aside from possible alcoholism (though that describes a lot of the ad men) – and it hurts to watch him be cruel and short to folks like Peggy only because we see how complicated and unhappy his situation is.  He has reserves of tenderness and sadness – but when a woman comes close to having control, to “speak her mind” Don snaps back.  Really Don clearly has issues with losing control over his life and his narrative.  When he snaps back – it is not pretty.
  7. Still, the lawnmower – wow.
  8. The main business of course with Sterling Cooper was the pending sale and reforming of the firm.  How all that unfolds is one of the neat episodes of the season.  Of course it (somehow inevitably) involves Joan being in the right place at the right time.  I am still surprised so much of the band stayed together.

Breaking Bad: Season 2 (SPOILERS!!!)

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Now this, THIS is a television program.  Of course, I have written this before.  We won’t rehash the editorial feelings about the show – aside from pointing out that the show has developed on its crackling, explosive strength that it showed out of the gate – but instead ruminate on some of the developing themes, as the depths of Walter White’s life and his newfound vocation grow.  In particular, we are seduced by the idea that Walter White is turning bad – but is this really true?

  • I mean, you look at the first season – and we see all the things he is up against.  His son with cerebral palsy, his loving but somewhat overbearing wife, quietly emasculating in-laws, a job teaching at a high school when his peers have achieved so much more scientific fame, his lung cancer – all are obstacles and challenges that we identify with so easily.  We identify with Walter and want him to succeed.  He is sympathetic – because of what he is up against and how he wants to care for his family.  However, his decisions now are getting colder … in Season 1 when he kills a man, it feels like self defense.  This is a dangerous character – what is he to do?  However, what do we make of his relief when he sees Jesse’s girlfriend die?  What do we make of Walter’s power play with his OWN SON by the pool?  What do we make of his lying to Jesse and getting him out for a marathon cooking session?  Yeah the success in the meth field has given Walter a ton of self confidence, and given his life some meaning – indeed, look at the joy in his face when he gets to leave the hardware store to tell someone to stay off of his turf – but has it also fomented his fundamental badness?  That is, we sympathized with him because of circumstance, and still do – it is seductive how much we want him to complete the drug deals and successfully hide his cash – but how much did we really know about HIS character vs stuff we just ascribed to him because of our fundamental humanity?  Maybe he is not turning bad, but just a bad guy who never had the forum to work his black magic?
  • The above notion is underlined in other scenes.  When Walter Jr has a fundraiser for his dad and talks about Walter’s quality, we wonder not “does he know about the meth?” so much as “Walter has never seemed like that sort of dude”.  Is Walter an angel?  Has he seeemed like a father of the year, or just an ornery withdrawn sot.  It just feels like his evil turn is no accident.
  • On the other hand, Jesse’s character arc is an interesting counterpoint.  He doesn’t want to be disowned by his family.  Sure, he has chosen a rough life, but clearly he wants some acceptance, at least from his brother on a level other than drug dealer.  He finds an apartment and gets with the gorgeous gothy supervisor girl next door.  But these are all his better instincts, to have a nicer place, run his drug ring – do something positive as it were.  Indeed, he really cares about Jane.  When Walter calls him to cook, remember, he is on the way to the museum to hang out with her.  Even when he is about to do meth, he wants her to leave – to not jeopardize her recovery.  Jesse is in approximately the same miserable place as Walter – worse being in rehab and all – but he seems like he is trying to fix himself, or at least is conflicted about the hard parts.
  • The inspired addition of course is Saul Goodman by the great Bob Odenkirk, though we know him less in dramatic work.  His performance is great as the shady lawyer.  He brings a combination of oiliness and street wisdom that Walter doesn’t have.  But he seems like he is a good guy to know.  Season 3 can’t come soon enough.

Beavis and Butthead

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They’ve returned, and not a moment too soon.  Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butthead in 1994 was one of the great satires on television.  The show – so well known as to not really require recapping, followed its namesakes through their adventures as terribly underwhelming high school students in a place that bears an awfully close resemblance to Texas.  In a way Judge was a genius in how he had a show lampooning disaffected teenagers hiding in plain view nestled in the middle of MTV’s lineup.  The particular inspiration was that the show managed to both have inside jokes while the outside of the jokes stayed funny as well.  Even if you just wanted to laugh at the hijinks of these kids, there was plenty of meat.

A scant fifteen years later, the show is back as MTV ordered 22 episodes.  The format has been largely kept.  The difference is really in the video commentaries.  As any snarkpot could tell you, MTV doesn’t play videos anymore.  Indeed, with the Web, why would artists need videos on MTV?  As such MTV no longer has a current cheap video library, so more often, we are left with the boys commenting on Jersey Shore episodes.  This is a dropoff from the first version of the show – lets face it, Teen Mom has plenty to mock, but not enough actual cheesiness to be able to hoot and holler.  The reality shows are more just generally pathetic than a satirical laugh a minute.

Fortunately though, while the video interludes are no longer inspired, the stories themselves still are.  As has usually been the case, the episodes involve taking a kernel of an idea – for instance when the fellas learn about the idea of asking a father for his daughter’s hand – and riding it to a very logical conclusion, or at least logical if you are as stupid as Beavis and Butthead are.  It is a savage view of teenagers and a world borne entirely from consuming television and shitty fast food – and in its spare visual style and story lines – the point of view is so sharply seen.  In particular, the episode where they get inspired by a certain popular vampire movie is just ridiculously brilliant.

Mad Men: Season 2 (SPOILERS!!!)

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With the Netflix subscription whirring along, thirteen episodes of AMC’s atmospheric Mad Men rather rapidly turns into twenty-six.  The art direction, set design and general look and feel for the show have not diminished since the Season 1 ramblings, so a qualitative review seems a bit pointless.  However, even if we stick to just Season 2 content and comparing it to Season 1, we’ll get quite a bit – even if it becomes an almost entirely “SPOILER ALERT” laden post.  So sue me.  Observations?

  1. One of themes that announced itself in the first season was the differing interactions with the feminist dynamics of the time.  Clearly this has continued to evolve as Peggy Olson is trying to be accepted and fluorish in this most masculine field on her own terms.  It has been hard clearly, and the show has been masterful in showing her earnestness as well as how she will in some sense always be considered “just a girl”.  The way she infiltrates an “entertainment dinner” with a customer shows the areas she has to straddle.
  2. It is neat to see real life actually work through the plot.  Sure, it is the 60s, but it is nice to see how they acknowledge it.  It was an inspiration to have the ad-guys at Sterling Cooper actually work with real companies and products that we all know.  JFK exists here, and Jackie Kennedy’s effect on female fashion.  We see the civil rights movement in the background – even so much as seeing homosexuality and interracial couples pop up.
  3. One of the interesting results of such period detail is that the show does not sugarcoat the reactions of characters to change.  Clearly, these folks have not had much exposure to well … just about anything we fancy as “diversity” in these 2011 times.  I know for some people, it can be uncomfortable – that the show is misogynist for instance.  Of course, this is not quite true – as the show is displaying characters who would feel that way.  The characters truly know what they should know and no more.  It is uncomfortable on the ears at times, but the authenticity is appreciated.
  4. The arc of Betty is the most mysterious of the characters – moreso than even Don Draper, whose layers are actually fairly accessible.  As portrayed by January Jones, Betty is very prim, proper and stiff.  It is hard to tell if Jones is performing poorly or if Betty is that wooden.  Weirdly, the effect works – as her countenance gives a perfect housewife’s mask to a lot of rage and a lot of psychoses.  Her breaches are so cold and shocking – when they occur, they seem horrible.  Of course, if she were a dude, perhaps the immorality would not be so viscerally felt.
  5. As for Don himself, obviously who is Don/Dick for realz continues to drive the show along.  What we do know is that Don yearns for control and for a measure of belonging.  He has been very successful at the firm, but you don’t see him mingling that much.  Jon Hamm makes Don’s interactions not stiff, but the practiced moves of a pro who goes home when it’s time to go home.  Guys do not know where Don goes.  Don has had a couple of affairs, sure, but there is a definite searching in his dalliances.  It is the same force that takes him to a beat show, or to just do a hippie dippie-ish sort of thing in California after he disappears on a business trip.  He shows an unease everywhere, except at the very end of the season.  Why is Mrs. Draper so good to him, and why does he connect so cleanly with her and that life?  It is the first time in two seasons we see Don at a place where he truly is natural.
  6. Pete Campbell is a tool.  That is all.

Breaking Bad – Season 1

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As the curtain goes up on Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad on AMC, we see a middle aged man in his underwear driving an RV frantically with a passed out partner, both in gas masks.  The RV hits a ditch, the man gets out takes out his camera, doffs his mask and we see a desperate message.  Is it a confession?  Is it a suicide note?  The desperation, the pace has been set up.  Yeah, we’re not sure why we are here, but the moment is gripping.  Hell yeah, THIS is a freakin’ television show.

Desperation is what crackles throughout the abbreviated first season of Breaking Bad.  There is the desperation of Walter White (Bryan Cranston), the old man we left off in the ditch back in the first paragraph.  He is a chemistry teacher in his 50s, in a loving marriage, but with a lot of bills stacking up.  As he gets a dicey cancer diagnosis, he looks at his chemistry background and access to chemicals, sees the bonanza from crystal meth – even has a DEA agent brother-in law to give him a ride to do some research, and suddenly voila!  A job opportunity.  At this stage in the game, Walter gives off a man just beaten up by life – between his bills, his family stresses and his own disease.

Desperation also oozes out of Jesse, Walter’s old student who has been put out of the meth business by the DEA.  Or at least he was, until Walter finds him and makes the offer.  One of the great pleasures of the show is the humor in their exchanges.  There is a definite comedy team sort of chemistry going on, but the comedy comes as they stumble from desperate position into another.  It is one thing to start the meth business game, but how do you find customers?  Jesse can do that, but it involves dangerous folks – folks who could rough Jesse up good.  Suddenly Walter is in with these thugs who are trying to steal his formula – or even worse, kill him.  So there is another desperate situation.  But what if this gets resolved – what next?  Bodies don’t just disappear, do they?  Like any good thriller, these sorts of conflicts are dealt with at the most elemental, ground level.  We see the decisions Walter and Jesse make, and they all make sense – I am not sure I could be a meth dealer, but if I were …

The desperation is at home too.  Skylar, Walter’s wife, loves him and wants to take care of him.  But he runs off for hours at a time.  What can she do?  The family is running low on funds.  She has to worry about him and a son with Cerebral Palsy.  She is desperate too – and the family interactions are true and tense.  Everybody here loves each other, but the equipment to communicate it just isn’t there – but how hard they try.  Even Jesse is desperate, trying to reconcile with his parents, and trying to at least show something for his little brother to mentor.

This show does even more than I’ve hinted though.  We see the desperation certainly, but we also see Walter dealing with it, and working his way around both his domestic life and his newfound criminal one.  How would we deal with his situation?  Would we be able to make correct moral decisions?  Would the moral compass shift?  It’s easy to see Vito Corleone as a good man when you are just in his shoes after all.  Right now, clearly the groundwork is being laid, but especially towards the end of the season – we maybe see the birth of a man who is not exactly where Walter saw this story headed.  This is the sort of show that bursts with life and energy – something Scorsese would have directed perhaps … it is just a lot of fun.

 

Mad Men: Season 1 (SPOILERS!!!)

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As Season 1 – the season that earned the first of four consecutive Emmy awards – of Mad Men closes, we see Don Draper sitting on the landing of the stairway in his Westchester County home, wondering where things are headed.  At this point, we know that Draper has a complicated, difficult past which he has been trying to put behind him but with only limited success.  The mystery hinted at in the third episode when his own co-worker noted that nobody knows much of his past, have started to crack open, yet when I finished with the first season, Don’s mystery is far less interesting than the show’s portrayal of the challenges for women and feminism in the 1960s.

As everyone knows by this point, AMC’s flagship series covers the exploits and goings-on at Sterling and Cooper, an advertising agency trying to compete in the very competitive environs of Madison Avenue.  Draper (Jon Hamm) is the creative head.  The agency of course, is the sort of boys club that seems entirely typical of a not-particularly-reformed-yet era.  The women in the secretarial pool are doing the archetypal secretarial things such as takings calls telling people “Mr. Campbell, call on line 2″ and whatever – but also are looked at by the account executives as frankly no more than skirts.  We know during this era, feminism and civil rights will start to rise – but we’re not there yet – and so what is left is this paradigm.  The show is particularly stark and hurtful in the things that some of the guys say – when critics accuse the show of misogyny, I can’t say I do not understand the criticism – but it so clearly sees the pickle the ladies are in.  Against this backdrop the show gives us three examples of women relating to this world – one who exploits the system, one who is trying to transcend the system, and one who is being crushed by it.

In some ways, while Hamm and Draper get the plaudits – Elisabeth Moss as Peggy Olson is the real hero of the first season, her story is certainly the one that evolves the most.  She starts the season as the new addition to secretarial pool and Don Draper’s secretary.  She is trying to get ahead, and to really make the most of herself – not just (if at all) trying to get her MRS degree.  She is shown the ropes by Joan Harris the buxom (only because I can’t think of a more emphatic word, her dresses are straining to hang on to her) head secretary.  Joan seems awfully sophisticated, living in the city, tagging the partner, and oscillating her hips in a way that seems more or less entirely intentional.  I am not sure if the liberated female has appeared at her doorstep – indeed her obliviousness to her roommate is a clue – but she is clearly operating within this male dominated system.  Her eyes are wide open, but her reality is a very catch-my-man-ish one.  Her advice to Peggy is almost entirely in the vein of looks and knowing her place – it would be kind of offensive in 2011, but in 1960 it is merely good pragmatism.

For Peggy, it takes a while.  Her attempts at trying to be a skirt earlier, but then her revelation that she could really be something on par with the account exec assholes who say things about her and her fellow secretaries behind their backs is one of the triumphs of the show.  She has to fight so hard, but when she has her victory at work it is one of the nicest moments of the season.  Of course as we leave the season, she has some tough decisions ahead of her, as her choice of career vs domestic is put in stark relief.

Betty Draper, Don’s wife, has made the housewife choice.  She is trying to fit into the 1960s model of a good wife, making roasts, taking care of the children, and giving up her share of the meat when the partner at her husband’s firm decides to invite himself over for dinner.  But she is not comfortable – we see this with tremors in her hands and with sudden odd releases of tension, such as her reaction to a threat to her dog from a neighbor.  January Jones’ work here is either brilliant invisible or incompetent – but she shows a wooden woman, or a woman who has been taught to not have feelings other than standing by her man.

The theme of the women go even further – as the differentiation in the male characters is very much in terms of how women serve in their lives.  We know most of the account executives are boorish, but Don Draper some how is not.  He is not without guilt, especially a couple of really grievous missteps, but he does hear Peggy’s ability to do things, and resists her overtures to be a good secretary.  Pete Campbell, a jealous account exec, is boorish, but the boorishness that comes from the frustration at being too nice a guy to be the asshole that he wants to be (if you know what I mean – it is more obvious if you watch the program).  The show covers all of this territory deftly – within the context of the 1960s patriarchal world and spectacular art direction that really makes it seem like the 1960s. (I am reminded in this respect as Far from Heaven)  Overall – definitely enough here to dive in to season 2.