Missing Mad Men

My summer tv will be so uneventful. Game of Thrones will soon end (alas! two more episodes! I can barely hold my excitement for them - the shit is about to go down harrrrd), and afterwards there will be luscious frustrating True Blood. But I'm still mourning that there will be no Mad Men this summer. Ugh. I miss it a lot and I don't know, summer always seemed the perfect time to watch it. Maybe it's the same simmering slow quality they both share. I'm going to have to start watching Doctor Who or Parks and Recreation, or something.

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.

Jezebel: Mad Men Won't Be Coming Back Anytime Soon

Jezebel reports:

There's good news and bad news for Mad Men fans. Creator Matt Weiner is working on a deal that would extend the show through a fifth and sixth season, but negations are taking so long that we won't be spending Sundays with Don and Joan this summer. In fact, production may be so delayed that the program won't come back until 2012.

However, the drama surrounding the show is already in full swing, as rumors have been flying about the state of negotiations for weeks. From Weiner's perspective, he deserves a hefty sum because the show is a massive critical hit that's responsible for reviving AMC. Yet, since the network has been able to develop other original series like Breaking Bad andThe Walking Dead, it's now less reliant onMad Men. (And due to the fact that Americans are more interested in the zombie apocalypse than a '60s advertising agency, The Walking Dead already has twice as many viewers as Mad Men.)

Hah. Last sentence so true. But does this mean that all I'll have to watch this summer is True Blood? COME ON! By last July, I was looking forward more to Mad Men each week than I was to Alexander Skarsgard's alternately naked glory. True Story.

"Christ on a Cracker, Where Do You Get Off?"

It's ridiculous how much Mad Men is making me laugh these days. True Blood is totally forgettable and unworthy of full attention for an hour each week, with the exception of its usual excellent guest actors (Alcide, Debbie during the all-out bitch smackdown, Russell) and because of Eric, obviously. On the other hand, I am determined to fully integrate "Christ on a cracker" into my cache of phrases.