Last year, Mad Men surpassed True Blood on my can't-wait-for-Sunday-night list, and all I can say, shame on you, Alan Ball. Yes, I actually prefer watching 50s ad executives and their Kennedy wives drown their non-problems in booze and cigarettes over x-rated vampire porn.
But no, it'll be nine more months before I can see Don Draper and John Slattery and the weird transition from 60s outfits to the 70s, and Cristina Hendricks and our favorite preteen psychotic Sally Draper, and all the rest.
Season 4 just hit the jackpot. It was just so unbelievably human and funny and tense - watching the characters reel off the precipices and caring enough about them to mentally beg them not to. You can read them like a book, and it doesn't lessen their complexity. Even the most surprising revelations made absolute sense, because the development was so organic. For instance, I loved that everyone on the blogs had the same eerie feeling that Don was going to propose to Megan, though it was so subliminal that most didn't confess until after it happened, and when it did, I actually shouted at the screen, "No! Don, don't you dare, you bastard!" When Boardwalk Empire premiered, everyone predicted that would be the next rising of the Sopranos, but in my opinion, Mad Men has emerged as the real, unlikely successor. (It still makes sense, seeing as the creators of both shows are ex-Sopranos writers) Mad Men explores the same theme "can people ever truly change?", and with the same psychological astuteness and subtlety (as well as a lot more grace and humor). And unlike the other two, Mad Men portrays some of the most fascinating and dynamic inter-female relationships on tv right now (whereas both the Sopranos and BE fail[ed] the Bechdel Test quite often and miserably).
God, it seems so unfair that Boardwalk Empire is just winning all the TV awards by default, just by virtue of being a novel, first season prestige show with all those fancy names attached. I'm sure it will only get better, just as Mad Men did, but its time hasn't come yet, and its first season did not even remotely COMPARE to Mad Men's season 4. I'll never forget how nuts everyone would go over every single episode (was there even a weak one?), especially for "The Suitcase". The aftershow blogs and discussions just made it ten times more interesting. And discussing Mad Men was really half the fun.
Well, until it comes back, I guess I can just spend the countdown wait speculating about January Jones' baby daddy. I wonder if the father is actually someone from the set of X-Men: First Class, as the rumor mill suggests. Also just putting it out there: James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender (aka Tom LeFroy and Mr. Rochester) are totally the Jesse Eisenberg and Andrew Garfield of 2011. Bromance forever.
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ReplyDeleteEven though I usually forsake Mad Men for True Blood on Sunday nights (the suspense is too much for that show, it is wonderfully frustrating as you said), but Mad Men was always a nice reward the next day. Something slow to savor like the glasses of nice whiskey they drink on the show versus the shot of tequila that TB is.
ReplyDeleteI have to confess I'm sort of a sporadic MM fan. I started watching the show in my freshman year of college (season 2) because my friend at the time was a huge MM buff and wanted someone to watch/discuss it with her so she dragged me in midway through season 2. When 2 finished, we watched season 1. Then I watched a good portion of season 3, but hated the meandering pace with whole episodes devoted to character development and no plot. I always find books that have whole chapters of description plodding and torturous, but an entire TV episode was almost more unbearable. But season 4 really swept me up, it just got better and better even the characters were making more and more bad decisions. I haven't had the opportunity to rewatch it (but I asked for the DVDs for my birthday, coming up on Saturday), but I have some really great memories of that season. I've always loved Peggy and was fascinated by her lesbian art scene friends and the Suitcase was one of the most satisfying hours of television I've ever had the privilege to watch. And Don, I half wanted to hug and slap him that season. The diary (were those really his candid thoughts or a clever way to manipulate the viewer? We'll never know), the Rolling Stones intro- hot damn, the intriguing progressive relationship with Faye completely dashed by Megan. But the fact we all cared so much meant that Weiner and Hamm had really made Don into a human being and not a cliche even if he ends up engaged to one at the end of the season.
I can't wait for MM to return. As you suggested, Sally Draper will be one of best characters to watch. I frequently find myself pondering who she would be today because she's about my parents age. And even though I've heard about how radical the 60s were in my American history classes from high school, MM manages to personify that and make us feel the shock and awe of those changes. It's going to be damn good, so I hate the fact we have to wait almost a year.
Ha - I've never considered that. I don't think that the series will exactly be long enough to delineate her turn into an adult, but I do hope the creators will later reveal in some kind of conference of the sort what they imagine her fate to be.
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